The Blooms of Spring

The Blossoms of Spring

Paragraphs excerpted from The Desert Year by Joseph Wood Krutch. Reprinted by special permission of the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York.

By mid-May there is not likely to be, even in the mountains, any more winter, and here below spring has passed into summer. The omnipresent prickly pears, which grew thin and discouraged during the seven-month drought, grew plump again after the first real shower and are covered with the large, lemon-colored flowers which will presently give way to luscious-looking, purple fruits in incredible numbers.

Other, smaller cacti are also blooming, and so are the giant saguaros, at the ends of whose grotesquely curving arms there appear little circlets of creamy white flowers... In the cactus family there seems to be a strange lack of proportion between the size of the various species and the size of the blossoms they bear. The saguaro flower is smaller than that of the prickly pear; even more remarkable, many a fiveor six-inch variety, half-hidden under a shrub or a stone, bears flowers as large or larger than either. One hardly notices these plants until they bloom; and one would hardly notice the bloom on the saguaro had not the fortyor fifty-foot trunk long been the most conspicuous thing in the landscape.

These monsters are almost the trade-mark of Arizona and their blossoms are its official "state flower." That is understandable enough, both because the giants are absolutely unique in the vegetable world and also because they are, practically speaking, Arizona's exclusive possession... If I had to choose one plant to express the spirit of the Sonoran Desert one which combines oddness of form and habit with the courage to flourish under seemingly impossible conditions, and which combines also the defensive fierceness of thorns with the spectacular, unexpected beauty of brilliant flowers - I think I should choose the ocotillo.

Its unbranched, almost straight stems, sometimes as many as fifteen or twenty of them, radiate from the common center at ground level and often reach ten or twelve feet into the air... The long wands, an inch or more thick and colored a soft gray faintly tinged with green, are composed of wood so dense, so hard, and so tough that the Papago Indians still use them for palisades; yet in the light breeze they nod just sufficiently to avoid any suggestion of stiffness as they stand, most of the time bare of leaves, waiting patiently for their moments.Text continued page 33

BLOSSOMS OF SPRING from page 16

After any substantial shower which happens to fall at almost any time of the year, hundreds of very small leaves spring directly from the wands along their entire lengths and clothe them in a sort of layer of green too thin to obscure their outline. For a week or two these leaves go actively about their business of turning carbon dioxide into the carbohydrate of plant tissues; then, when the soil has ceased to supply the moisture which the plant cannot afford any longer to lose by evaporation, the leaves drop off to appear again a few months later, so that, in the course of a year, the ocotillo may enjoy not one but four or five separate springs and autumns.

Nevertheless, it knows somehow when the one authentic spring has come and, whether it be at the moment leafy or leafless, a tapering cluster of buds forms at the very tip of nearly every branch and soon expands into a fouror five-inch cone of waxy scarlet blossoms. Seen as one often sees them, the tips against the deep blue of an Arizona sky, the effect is... as festive as anything in nature...

Persistent legends notwithstanding, the cholla is not a “jumping cactus,” and its joints do not detach themselves from the plant to leap at inoffensive passers-by. He who finds thorns in his arm or leg has certainly been, however inadvertently, the aggressor. The rudeness of the cactus... is a defensive rudeness. Its motto is only the motto of South Carolina: “Do not tread upon me.”...

Tucked away between stones, the little echinocereus cacti were shaded under the absurd opulence of their large purple flowers, and, by way of variety, there was an area of desert floor a few hundred yards away which looked just as dry as the rest but which must have been somehow more favorably situated in some respect since it was covered by a bright, variegated carpet of tiny plants.

Many of them were annuals and most looked like the little alpines of some cultivated rock garden. Within an area of a few square yards I counted some fifteen different species, all in bloom. Most had almost no foliage and seemed to consist almost exclusively of blossoms. Such vegetative parts as they had were either threadlike, or fuzzy, or dry, for they were all determined to waste no moisture...On postcards and in travel magazines such scenes as this are usually labeled “Devil’s Garden.” But I see nothing infernal about it.... Perhaps I am still a little bit romantic about the desert and therefore like best of all these “devil’s gardens” because they represent the desert way of life in its most characteristic and most successful form.... Permanent residents who love this country are inclined to form little oases about their houses and to pamper with the water from their wells some of the lusher forms of vegetation.... I still find a cactus or an ocotillo very good company. I respect their virtues and they are indifferent to my weaknesses.