THE NERVE OF MOTHER NATURE...

Fittonia albivenis is native to South America — to places such as Ecuador and Colombia, Bolivia and Brazil. Indigenous tribes in these places use the plant’s leaves as a salve for headaches and muscle pain. Toothaches, too.

The Matsigenka people live in the high jungle of the eastern Andes and ingest the plant for its hallucinogenic effects. It is said to produce visions of eyeballs.

In North American greenhouses and on the shelves of plant people, Fittonia albivenis is known as “nerve plant.”

I have a former student — now a friend — named Ingrid Mariz de Andrade, who lives in Rio de Janeiro. Although she admits she’s “not good” at identifying the plants she encounters every day, she’s certain she’s seen nerve plants along city pathways.

For a year, Ingrid studied investigative journalism and narrative writing at Arizona State University. Sometimes she struggled with living in the desert and ached for the greens and blues of home. When she graduated last summer, she hopped a jet back to South America, taking bits and pieces of our desert with her.

I realized only recently that there is a bit of Brazil in my home, here in the Sonoran Desert. Three nerve plants. I like their strange, delicate vascularity and the way they make me think of canopies of trees and faraway spaces and the way the jungle must smell after a storm.

Two of the plants live in a vintage terrarium I carefully filled with the right soil. Each week or 10 days (or so), I take a plastic spray bottle loaded with distilled water, open the glass door to their vessel and spritz. I close my eyes as I do it, fearing that a temporary loss of humidity will put the plants in peril.

The third nerve plant sits exposed on the lower shelf of a plant stand in front of our north-facing window. This is its fourth or fifth home, as I fight to keep its leaves from falling. Each week or 10 days (or so), I place it in a bath of distilled water. I should have just added it to the terrarium.
 

This place is a stranger to damp, except during our monsoon, that hopeful stretch between mid-June and late September when desert people look east and west and north and south in the hope of seeing the sweet swell of dark clouds. In 2025, though, we waited. Despite high humidity and some afternoons when the sky seemed to change, the rain was just a tease. That is, until the second week in October, when the remnants of two tropical cyclones — Priscilla and Raymond — combined with a large-scale, stationary low-pressure
system and made their way into the Southwest.

“The amount of water in the atmosphere was 200 to 300 percent of what is normally present during the second week of October,” says Madison Kaminski, who’s in her fourth year of studying meteorology and climatology, along with journalism and mass communication, at ASU. “This is extremely important in the development of severe thunderstorms, because surface moisture is a key ingredient for instability.

“Essentially, throughout the day, as the surface heats up, the moist, humid air is forced to evaporate. Like what you see when boiling pasta, that ‘steam,’ or warm, moist air, is forced to rise. As it rises, it inevitably cools and then condenses into a cloud. The more low-level moisture and daytime heating you have, the more energy the atmosphere creates. The more energy that’s created means there’s more energy that needs to be released. This is sort of the basic atmospheric principle as to why we get thunderstorms.”

Madison reminds me that it’s really not that unusual to see tropical activity in Arizona in October, but she also acknowledges that the severity of October’s storms was directly tied to that low-pressure system.

“These severe storms would never have played out the way they did if not for this mechanism,” she says. “It essentially helped funnel the moisture that was south and north of us toward us here in Arizona. What is rare and extremely interesting is that we actually saw a spiral rainband from Raymond, a tropical cyclone, reach the Valley. The supercell that ran over Tempe, with wind speeds between 80 and 90 miles per hour and rainfall rates between 1 and 1.5 inches per hour, was a direct result of this.”

And then we saw a desert jungle. The wildflowers in our yard — African daisies and poppies, more species from faraway places — that went to seed in the spring started growing anew, reaching that 6-inch height at which the city gets the idea to call them weeds. But then they bloomed, a secondary profusion blanketing the wild spaces that turned brown in the wake of an extraordinarily hot summer, the fourth hottest on record in the state.

Ocotillos bloomed again, too, their tangelo-colored flowers bowing under the weight of rain and renewed interest from hummingbirds and bees. Fouquieria splendens, unlike Fittonia albivenis, is endemic to this desert, along with the Mojave, Colorado and Chihuahuan. The name ocotillo comes from a Nahuatl word meaning “torch,” but it’s also sometimes referred to as candlewood, coachwhip, flaming sword and vine cactus, among other, somewhat less inventive synonyms.
 

For weeks after the October storm, in the low, aching light of early morning, I’d pull open the front blinds to watch two Anna’s hummingbirds flutter from our ocotillo to the yellowbell, to the firecracker, to the spine of a tall aloe bloom, then back to the coachwhip.

I took to familiar trails again to run our dog before work. When the rain ended, the desert — awash in its sweet, familiar petrichor — began for me again. The tips of creosote bushes popped with yellow flowers, and the plant once more dropped its fuzzy white seeds. Creosote. Larrea tridentata. Chaparral. In Mexico, the plant is sometimes called hediondilla, from hediondo. “Smelly.”

Creosote bushes, like ocotillos, are prevalent across the desert Southwest. They thrive in the arid environment, their deep roots capable of pulling water that species with shallower anchors can’t access. The plant is toxic to most desert animals, with the exception of the jackrabbit and, interestingly, the dromedary camel — a species the U.S. Army introduced to the Southwest in the 1800s.

Although herbivores can’t ingest it, the plant is considered a nurse species because its leaves fall into piles beneath it, enriching the soil and providing shade for young cactuses. Indigenous populations, for generations, have used parts of the plant for remedies and its ash for tattoo pigment.

Fall mornings became meditations. The blinds, the birds, the ocotillo, the trail, the creosote, checking the humidity in the terrarium — all of it vascular in and of itself, the pulse of a day, a week, a month. Even the houseplants seemed happier, including the solitary nerve plant. Old homes drink humidity sometimes, I suppose.

Eventually,  the birds moved on to other nearby plants and I felt in my hands that winter was near.

Two weeks before Christmas, catastrophic, widely underreported storms — atmospheric rivers — pummeled the Pacific Northwest, where my in-laws live. They’re no stranger to wind and rain and cold. But in the middle of one Tuesday night, a rare west wind rocked the grove of trees on their property. One, a ponderosa pine more than 75 feet tall, was violently uprooted, crashing into their home and cars. A massive, ancient Pinus ponderosa. The 3.5 inches of rain that fell afterward further complicated things. But my in-laws are OK. Their sweet, massive Great Pyrenees is OK. The house will be repaired. The cars will be replaced.

Where the Southwest aches for rain, the Northwest suffers from it sometimes.

As I write this, the Valley again waits. This new rain is expected to last for a day or two. We’ll welcome it again, in the hope that spring will be ripe with the glow of hillside wildflowers, blooming ocotillos and creosote.

Sometimes I wonder if the way we long for rain is greedy. But maybe, really, it’s just a way to feed our imaginations. To transport us to South American jungles or the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, or to and through the seasons.