To appreciate wild things, one can climb every mountain and ford every stream. Or, as is my personal habit, simply traverse the same trail daily to brood about minuscule shifts in the landscape and note differences over time. It’s ablaze out there with familiar wildflowers, vibrating with colors that Candy Crush could only wish for.

But by digging below the surface, literally right down into the ground, one uncovers a special group of plants that are really on a high this season, and Wild Hyacinth, Wild Rhubarb, and Desert Death Camas are three of the more elusive beauties on parade. They’re geophytes - translated from the ancient Greek of botany as Earth Plants. Spending a good part of their lives hidden asleep in the soil, they bide their time in dormancy until roused by favorable conditions. Broadly put, geophytes are storage vessels that hold plant life in suspended animation underground, sheltered from adversity such as drought and fire. These cagey soil-dwellers paint a picture of resilience, stubbornness, and even danger.

Corms: Wild Hyacinth

It takes great care to avoid trampling the low-growing tubular coils that line the shoulder of my trail. They reveal buried corms1 belonging to Wild Hyacinth (Dipterostemon capitatus). Most commonly known as—yes, Blue Dicks—these periwinkle-colored blooms emerge from the dense starchy bulbotubers2, which are beloved by wildlife as little nutrient bombs. Why would a plant evolve to attract herbivory instead of repelling it? Well, to serve our old friend species dispersal, which we looked at last fall. Bears, deer, and rodents prize the heart of a Wild Hyacinth, and they’re surprisingly wasteful in the eating of it, breaking apart its segmented body and leaving behind a trail of crumbs.

There’s method behind this un-thrifty madness, since corms produce numerous cormlets or cormels, each with the capacity to detach and form a new plant. Trad gardeners know that dividing gladiolis enhances the vitality of the original plant while providing new cormlets as incentives for bargain-loving humans to make new plants for free. By being delectable to critters, Wild Hyacinths trick furry litterbugs into doing the same.

Tuberous Roots: Wild Rhubarb

Another geophyte currently bursting into daylight is Wild Rhubarb or Canaigre or Tanner’s Dock (Rumex hymenosepalus). Like a showgirl’s headdress, statuesque mauve inflorescences ascend one or two feet off a bed of fat, waxy leaves. By summer, blushing flowers morph into many faceted plumes of reddish-brown seed heads, betraying Wild Rhubarb’s lineage as a member of the buckwheat family.

Height is a bonus for any wind-pollinated plant3 but this one has extra reproductive backstops. Below the pomp and circumstance lies its tuberous roots made up of multiple storage roots attached in a tangle. Numerous plants are often seen clustered together sharing a single root system, making the younger plants genetically identical clones that offset vegetatively4. While we’re on a vocabulary spree, this plant is also a hermaphroditic perennial with the ability to self-fertilize.

Humans have found as many ways to use R. hymenosepalus as the plant has found to reproduce. Tannins from roots are used for tanning leather and creating earthy brown dyes, ethnobotanical applications ranged from astringents for sores and concoctions for digestive maladies, and seeds and leaves were harvested as food. Although traditionally cultivated by separating the tuberous roots and by encouraging leafiness by cutting the flower stalks, all parts of this plant are high in harmful oxalic acid, meaning that it’s just plain stupid to forage without knowledge of processing to remove toxicity.

A True Bulb: Desert Death Camas

From toxic to lethal, the winter rains also caused a proliferation of Desert Death Camas or False-hellebore (Toxicoscordion brevibracteatum, formerly known as Zigadenus brevibracteatus). Sweet in appearance with pale diminutive flowers that resemble distant twinkling stars, the petit bulb defends itself mightily using steroidal alkaloids, a group that includes toxins from deadly nightshade and poison dart frogs. Adding to the air of malice implied by its name, T. brevibracteatum emerges from a bulb easily mistaken for that of edible wild onions.

Here a reader might be suddenly distracted, seeing a plot twist for a new Desert noir centered around this little pint of terror. Not to be a downer, but Mojave plus gothic novel is already well-trodden ground, and this dispatch celebrates local plant arcana so please return to class.

Geophytes at Large

The characteristics that make true bulbs distinctive from other types of geophytes can be illustrated by cutting an onion from the grocery store in half. A bulb’s layers, or scales, are leaf bases, cradling nascent foliage leaves and a fully formed flower embryo at their center. Meanwhile, tuberous roots are thickened storage roots, and corms, tubers, and rhizomes are actually solid stems.

As a group, geophytes are textbook survivalists, hunkering down in their sunken bunkers and hoarding energy supplies through lean years, periodically surfacing to make food using sunlight energy to set aside even more stores. Wild Hyacinth, Wild Rhubarb, and Desert Death Camas share prepper strategies with fellow stunners Desert Mariposa Lily (Calochortus kennedyi) and Desert Lily (Hesperocallis undulata), also giving us glorious displays this year.

Such is the radiance of these geophyte blooms that they can seduce the staunchest conservationist to hover a finger over Buy Now buttons on platforms like Etsy, where seed may have been harvested without regard for sustaining wild populations or the sanctity of sites such as preserves and national parks. Sober minds know that to achieve the aspirational blooms shown on seed packets, several years are needed before substantial storage organs form. Then allow several more for nutrients to stockpile prior to flowering. That’s an optimistic scenario: a native grower once told me that seed to showy bloom can take as much as eight years, making earth plants an awfully slow burn for seed grown nursery production. But this unwillingness to be tamed as garden varieties causes one to revere them all the more.

So enjoy the fleeting show. When it’s over, our geophytes will dim the lights and disappear back into their subterranean dreaming. In the meantime, I’ll cast anxious glances over my trail, hoping it remains undisturbed in years to come so that I may encounter my old friends when they next pass this way.

Author’s note: Please respect the sensitive nature of native plants in the wild and avoid letting enthusiasm lead to depletion through collection or harvest.

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Before the arrival of invasive Russian thistles, Eurasian mustards, and an evil cadre of introduced grasses, when lighting strikes ignited isolated desert plants, the decomposed granite floor of the desert limited the travel of flames. Now continuous fuel beds made up of these invasives add velocity to fires and create pathways from plant to plant, leaving behind a post-fire landscape where those same interlopers gain the upper hand. Affected desert scrub areas can permanently shift to a non-native, highly flammable grassland, making the stakes even higher.

Two helpful photo guides for identifying these and other invasives can be found through Joshua Tree National Park and the Mojave Desert Land Trust. How do we combat their hostile takeover, and who are these plants that embedded themselves in the Mojave?

Legend

Ah, the romance of the tumbleweed. A great tarot symbol for the Seeker, carried by winds to no particular destination searching out new opportunities in vast lands. As a beloved cliché of western expansion it’s right up there with swinging saloon doors and tin pots rattling underneath wagons. We lift our voices to the tumbleweed—pop music abounds with references, generally used by men to conceptualize cherished independence and less often by women as metaphors for elusive, unrequited love.

And just as tumbleweeds sweetly evoke a song by Willie Nelson, Sylvia, or Afroman, the record makes the cringy sound of a needle scraping across its surface.

The truth is we’ve been conned by this plant. Its real identity is Russian thistle; odd considering its status as a cultural icon of the free-spirited American west. Imported in the late 1800s mixed into crop grain, a single Salsola tragus plant can produce up to a quarter of a million spiky seeds. As we nonchalantly strum guitars, dried plants break away from their five-foot water-sucking root systems to rove the landscape, reborn as laser-focused seed dispersing machines.

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To further illustrate its hypnotic power over us, we assist its quest for global domination by taking tumbleweeds home as souvenirs or yard art and ship them out globally as Etsy chandeliers or party decor. In these parts, they’ve beguiled us into thinking that the easiest method of dispatch is dragging the ground, while in reality we’re doing their bidding by sprinkling their seeds into the broken soil they so prefer.

Fable

When bringing the Good Word west, Jesuit priests scattered mustard seed to create a ribbon of heavenly gold to mark the path home.

Cue up ecclesiastic music, but this popular account has no basis in fact. One could conjecture that the storied tale was memeified in a game of Telephone since venturing Jesuits upheld the “Parable of the Mustard Seed,” an allegory of something small growing to become all encompassing.

Overwhelming is more like it, given the growing habits of London rocket (Sisymbrium irio) and the behemoth called Sahara mustard (Brassica tournefortii), the two invasive mustards that are ubiquitous in our landscape. Both are adept at colonizing disturbed soil or burn areas by forming dense monocultures before native plants are able to reestablish themselves. Seed count per plant: up to ten thousand. Through a process known as allelopathy, they release chemicals that inhibit other plants and beneficial soil fungi. Seed pods, or siliques, have a sticky coating that allows them to hitchhike on fur, clothing, and tires. Very clingy and uncool.

Two well-behaved native mustards should not be pigeonholed with the Bad Guys: white-blooming native California Mustard (Caulanthus lasiophyllus) and the diminutive, lacy-leaved Western Tansymustard (Descurainia pinnata).

Myth

The American dream. A perfect lawn and a steak on every plate. SFX needle scraping across record.

Perhaps the dream is still alive somewhere, but lawns are on the outs. Even self-assured AI can’t estimate the number of times that the phrase “kill your lawn” appears on the internet. We don’t bother with lawns here in the Hi Desert, yet grasses have crept into our lives, as testified by the verdant shadows creeping over the desert floor this winter.

To keep itself plush enough to become a wall-to-wall yard carpet, lawn grasses were selected for their ability to fill themselves in. First they knock down any plant competition by bombing the ground with wind-dispersed seed, then bring it on home with a root system that spreads laterally just below the surface. New growth can pop up anywhere along the root pathways, and the dense subterranean network creates a fibrous mat that prohibits water percolation, effectively starving out other plants.

One hundred years before lawns became synonymous with norms, Joshua trees were harvested for livestock fenceposts and cattle roamed the west freely. As these four-legged tractors of yesteryear busied themselves overgrazing and trampling land, three botanical nightmares, red brome (Bromus madritensis ssp. rubens), cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), and ripgut brome (Bromus diandrus) arrived in California, purportedly in contaminated grain. The bovine- degraded soil was beyond perfection for an explosion of these bromes.

Their seeds masterfully barb socks, worm their way so deeply into pet fur that a wound can form, and tear the mucosal linings of tortoise orifices. It cleverly grows at the base of other plants, remaining unmolested and producing hundreds of seeds per plant. Like fellow black hats Russian thistle and Sahara mustard, bromes have developed resistance to herbicides.

Brimstone

Why the finger-wagging over ugly plants? Because invasives pose several existential threats. For one, they disrupt all levels of the food chain, although the ripple effect hasn’t fully reached us here at the tippy-top. More immediately, the live-fast-die-young credo of invasive plants has been turbocharged by our unusually heavy rainfalls and warm weather. A full season ahead of schedule, early generations are coming up around us—plants that dry to a crisp at the first real heat, and easily curl into flame when coaxed.

Anyone who witnessed the 2006 Sawtooth fire complex east of Pioneertown is left with a montage of unearthly impressions: daytime darkness punctuated by an eerie red halation denoting the sun, confused wildlife fleeing across roadways only to dissipate into clouds of smoke on the other side, emergency vehicles constantly flying past except for an eerie period of quiet when efforts halted because a voyeur sent a up drone to satisfy personal curiosity. These things can’t be unseen.

We fertilize invasive plants with nitrogen by burning fossil fuels: whereas desert natives, adapted to nutrient poor conditions, suffer from nitrogen enhancing emissions. We provide disturbed areas to act as invasive seed incubators, and we warp speed evolution by using herbicides that only show these plants how to become chemical-resistant super strains.

In return we get not one single word of thanks, just relentless whispers of gimme more. Blade, pollute, spray. And if you won’t do it for us, we’ll make the desert burn.

Moral of the Story

Tender green weeds often feel small and unthreatening…some even start off with a few pretty flowers. But to keep invasive plants from overtaking one’s space, there’s no better time for their removal than now, before they develop into seed silos with deep root systems that monopolize soil moisture. Waiting until summer means toiling in heat to hula hoe the now dry fire fuel, literally planting seeds in the process and giving rise to even bigger populations in years to follow. With well-timed efforts and early removal, the scale of the task will gradually subside over time, allowing native species to again claim their rightful place.

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Forget super blooms. We’re talking seeds, baby, the floral afterglow of autumn as the seasons cusp toward winter.

Wild hallucinations of flowers were then, this is now, and desiccated petals have fallen away to divulge the inner persona of native plants in the form of elegant, bizarre seed heads. We trend contemplative as the weather cools, and that allows us to see that blooms shed of their ornaments reveal that which is most purposeful in the life cycle of a plant.

Right about now the last remaining seeds are leaving their motherships. At their most basic they simply drop to the ground. But wing-shaped bracts or puffy attachments carry some seeds aloft in winds, and those with barbs or burrs hitch rides from passing mammals or shoes. Pods dry out and crack to release seed in a process called dehiscence,1 and certain festive-minded pods explode to fling their contents accompanied by a sound similar to a piñata popping open. Birds can transport seeds intercontinentally, and some insects are key-short range dispersers. Squirrels scamper with mouthfuls and dribble seeds on the way to their caches. Coyotes eat rodents with seed still in their bellies and spread their predator pies throughout territories as signposts: anecdotally, a local naturalist cites occurrences of palo verde seedlings growing from their scat. And the overriding objective of plants is to seek out new territories where offspring may be even better adapted. This mechanism offers hope as humans radically alter native habitats and is the guiding principle behind land management policies centered around climate refugia mitigation.2

Once seeds travel throughout the landscape they become part of an in-ground seed bank. There they sit disguised as grains of desert soil, remaining in suspended animation inside their casements for months, years, or decades waiting for just-so triggers. Even when conditions align and a seedling is born, a percentage of that same species’ seed will exercise delayed germination,3 holding back for another time to ensure that sudden adverse weather or a roving herbivore won’t wipe out their entire generation.

The tiniest seeds need UV light to emerge, and once a brave little root radicle4 pokes out, their reserves can’t last the extra hours needed to push up through the soil before growing leaves to start processing food. Hence they remain hidden in plain sight on the surface of the ground, and almost all of our annual wildflowers fit into this group. Their viability is diminished by ground disturbance, blowers, and smothering blankets of invasive plants, many of which are unwittingly introduced through birdseed mixes and indifferent retail nurseries. Feathery exotic grasses, sexy though they may be, are among the worst garden escapees and also have harmful consequences for tortoises that mistake them for forage.5 Invasives are especially formidable because much of their seed can after-ripen,6 or continue to mature, even after being hula-hoed under or ripped out and left for dead.

How does a latent plant embryo decide it’s showtime? Through phytohormones called gibberellins.7 Let’s not go there other than to say that they kick off cellular shenanigans that break dormancy, largely based on water, light, upward movement in temperatures, and a host of super variable factors like whatever befell the seed after it departed the plant.

Cold weather rainfall is important for spring germination since Mojave plants evolved with winter rains, unlike the other Southwestern deserts with their summer precipitation patterns. Many seeds need an adequate period of chill called cold stratification8 to wake up as weather warms. Others require scarification,9 such as the abrasion of its coating by windblown sand, mandibles, or buck-toothed nibblers. Impervious seed casings sometimes need the help of an animal’s digestive tract, then there are the fire followers10 that need smoke or flames to stir.

And get this, it’s crazy: some have an oil filled blob—elaiosome if you must know11—that is manna for ant larvae. It entices colony workers to schlep seeds hither and yon, and germination is enhanced by ants abrading seed coatings as they extract the oil. Although diaspores (seed with elaiosome) are rare in the Mojave, ants harvest seed nonetheless and clean them, oft times imparting antimicrobial benefits of ant chemistry.12 Finally, the seeds are discarded at the mound entrance where soil is well aerated from tunneling, plus nutrient rich from insect carcasses or other organic refuse tossed out during nest cleaning. Time to rethink those ants in your plants as grub-lovin’ gardeners.

What the heck are seeds, anyway? Miniature dots and dashes that contain the enormity of nature. Her intricate web first seems like an impenetrable monolith, but insight comes easily by creating patches of ecosystems on our parcels, patios, or windowsills—sowing seed, using native plants that reseed, or just being mindful of the seed bank gifted to us. Rewilding has big impacts even when done small scale and is a powerful antidote for despair in a world where very soon your vote might not count. Rather, turning away from the noise is a choice opposite of putting on blinders: it’s a reminder that we are still vastly outweighed by the green biomass of the earth. Immersing oneself in the moving confluence of seasons and botany underscores the rhythms of our own species and weights us firmly on the ground, buoyed by the life underfoot.

As spring settles in, we have cause for celebration. Our Joshua trees are blowing up with flowers.

Yucca brevifolia, commonly know as the Western Joshua tree, has been around since the Pleistocene. Having made it for this long in spite of shrinking habitat and the extinction of its primeval seed disperser (a prehistoric nine-foot long ground sloth), these iconic trees haven’t endured by being dummies. One strategy in their survival tool box is masting,1 whereby a high percentage of the population synchronizes blooming every five years or so. While it’s a matter for scientists, not essayists, to decide if 2025 will be proclaimed an official mast year, these episodic displays invite a ramble.

The whys and whens of such bumper crops remain theoretical but the accepted thinking is simple. As a keystone2 species, Joshua trees are a mother lode within their ecosystem, and they support a wide array of other living things. By flooding the wildlife market with more flower and seed than can be consumed, fruits are left behind to ripen and spill to the ground. Rodents (now the primary seed disperser of Y. brevifolia) carry off as much overflow as they can grab, caching uneaten stores of the little black nuggets in their hidey-holes. Not all of the stash is retrieved and some germinates. In a cycle that propagates new Jts, the hoarders are also laying groundwork for their offspring to enjoy even bigger hauls down the road.

Nature just makes sense. Flower spikes are white, fragrant, and held high in order to be discoverable in darkness by Y. brev’s only pollinator, a nocturnal moth. Crafty bloom presentation is a survival imperative—no pollinator, no viable seed. Floral lures aside, the trees have a second way to clinch the deal with their moths. The seeds are the exclusive food of the larva, and masting produces the extra needed to reward their pollinator for fertility. Giving and taking, with loopholes: if too many moth eggs are laid in a flower, the developing seed can abort, preventing an imbalanced larval population from overwhelming the tree’s reproductive goals.

To split hairs further, only one moth has the anatomy to pollinate Y. brevifolia, while Y. jaegeriana (the Eastern Joshua tree) has a singular relationship with a different moth. In such obligate mutualism,3 neither moth nor plant can continue to exist without the specific other.

Glimpsing moths can be elusive but the visual differences between the two species of Joshua trees are apparent. Our westerners trend taller with longer leaves, while their eastern kin sport a shorter, multi-trunk form with stubbier rosette heads. As temperatures rise, some researchers postulate that Y. brev will evolve toward Y. jaeg’s compact form…after all, it takes a lot more energy to draw water and nourishment up a taller trunk, and elevating foliage above the muzzle of a giant sloth is no longer relevant.

Both Joshua trees are capable of vegetative reproduction4 by sending out horizontal root stalks, which produce sucker plants as a fail-safe to seeding. These can sprout several feet away from the original tree and are often misconstrued as new individuals, tempting well-meaning humans to relocate them as garden freebies. However, unlike dividing agaves or grasses, transplanting Joshua tree offsets is a doomed affair as the clones rely on the mature root system of the parent plant for sustenance. They do play a role in harvesting additional sunlight energy and mainlining it to the larger complex for photosynthetic processing, similar to adding more panels to your solar infrastructure.

But generally speaking, clonal reproduction has less status in nature’s hierarchy than seed reproduction: clones are an exact genetic duplicate of the parent whereas every seed is a unique individual with the potential of having some one-off trait that holds a key to resilience in times of changing environmental pressures. Seeds also carry latent traits, either useful in a past era or anomalies that have yet to be discarded, ready to be triggered when conditions shift. Deviation followed by natural selection, the far-sighted equation for hardiness. Before the Anthropocene, organisms had all the generations in the world to contemplate such things.

Because nature’s basic MO means probing for improvement through experimentation, it’s not surprising to learn that a few Y. brevifolia x Y. jaegerina hybrids manifested along the way. Evolutionarily speaking these outliers don’t show signs of having particularly useful adaptations as their known population has failed to expand past a region shared with military testing and the infamous Area 51. They do inspire thoughts about the dexterity of a few local moths, but given its UFO pedigree, novel pollinator gymnastics would hardly be the freakiest thing to ever happen in Tikaboo Valley, Nevada. Let’s leave it there and return to masting.

Although predator satiation5 is just a leading hypothesis for Joshua tree masts, the premise dovetails seamlessly with fact. Seed production costs plants dearly in energy expenditure. Annual blooming is a risky gamble for a species that must sustain a large body and also hold onto substantial reserves as a hedge against years of drought. By holding back and then communally blasting flowers, the resources spent on seeding become a smarter, to-scale investment, wherein each individual stands a better shot at both passing on its unique adaptations and also contributing to the long term survival of the species by out-competing herbivory.

That’s what’s so amazing about plants, their total dedication to forward thinking strategies for species persistence. Well, not just that. Only plants can perform energy conversion by turning pure sunlight and a bit of water into things like sugars, carbs, cellulose, and fossil fuels: processes that humans have been trying to duplicate unsuccessfully for years. And crazier yet, when mammals were still a twinkle in the eye of a cyanobacteria,6 the first plants were busy gulping CO2 (carbon dioxide) and H2O (water), utilizing the carbon and hydrogen molecules, and outgassing only the oxygen. The result was the atmosphere that sustains life on our planet today.

By what mechanism does a community of trees reach agreement on flowering in tandem, and begin converting the necessary resources so far in advance? Rainfall alone is not a reliable prognosticator. California’s 2025 poppy bloom was meager due to a dry year yet the Joshua trees are putting on a show. While some researchers assert that warming temperatures correlate with shorter intervals between mast years, others express concern that increased masting frequency might be a reaction to environmental stress, coupled with the natural inclination of plants to reproduce ahead of potential decline—or worse yet, when the writing is on the wall.

But the glistening white plumes also signal the optimism we crave, in a green cloak embroidered with symbols of vigor. They could not have come at a better time. How nice it would be to live in a world where such truly phenomenal occurrences were a study priority, and to have more answers than questions. For the present, it’s glorious to drink in the inflorescences of a new season, and marvel at beautiful things that defy knowing.

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