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    California Desert Wildflowers
    California Desert Wildflowers
    California Desert Wildflowers
    Ebook291 pages1 hour

    California Desert Wildflowers

    By Philip A. Munz

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    Some of the most spectacular and famous spring wildflower displays in California occur in the state's deserts. In fact, California's deserts support a surprisingly rich diversity of plants and animals year-round, making them a rewarding destination for outdoor enthusiasts as well as professional naturalists. First published forty years ago, this popular field guide has never been superseded as a guide to the wildflowers in these botanically rich areas. Easy-to-use, portable, and comprehensive, it has now been thoroughly updated and revised throughout, making it the perfect guide to take along on excursions into the Mojave and Colorado Deserts.


    Some of the most spectacular and famous spring wildflower displays in California occur in the state's deserts. In fact, California's deserts support a surprisingly rich diversity of plants and animals year-round, making them a rewarding destination for ou
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of California Press
    Release dateMar 29, 2024
    ISBN9780520314481
    California Desert Wildflowers
    Author

    Philip A. Munz

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      Book preview

      California Desert Wildflowers - Philip A. Munz

      CALIFORNIA DESERT WILDFLOWERS

      California

      Desert

      Wildflowers

      by Philip A. Munz

      UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

      Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969

      UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

      Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

      UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, LTD.

      London, England

      © 1962 by The Regents of the University of California

      Second Printing, 1969

      SBN: 520-00898-7, cloth

      520-00899-5, paper

      Library of Congress Catalog Number 62-8626

      Printed in the United States of America

      CONTENTS

      CONTENTS

      INTRODUCTION

      FERNS AND CONE-BEARERS Section One

      FLOWERS ROSE TO PURPLISH-RED OR BROWN Section Two

      COLOR PLATES

      FLOWERS WHITE TO PALE CREAM OR PALE PINK OR GREENISH Section Three

      FLOWERS BLUE TO VIOLET Section Four

      FLOWERS YELLOW TO ORANGE Section Five

      INDEX TO COLOR PLATES

      INDEX

      INTRODUCTION

      The Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden at Claremont, California, was established for the study of the native plants of California. When therefore in 1959, after about twelve years of continuous work, the large technical book A California Flora (by Munz and Keck, University of California Press) was published, it seemed to me that the Botanic Garden as an institution and I as an individual owed something to the layman, the person who has no particular botanical training but who likes to know something about his surroundings in nature. I therefore planned a series of three small books which might be placed in the glove box of the car or carried easily when on a hike. These books were to consist primarily of pictures, some as ink drawings and some as color photographs, with just enough text to give names and a few pertinent facts describing the plants and their location. The young man who made most of the drawings for the first of these three books suggested the catching title Posies for Peasants, and caught exactly the idea of a nontechnical approach I have tried to imagine.

      The first of these books has now been out for a few months. Called California Spring Wildflowers, it portrays plants found between the Sierra Nevada and the more southern mountains on the one hand and the sea on the other. It has met such a warm response that I am heartened to present herewith the second one, California Desert Wildflowers, for the area east of the Sierra Nevada from Mono County south to northern Lower California. The third one contemplated is California Mountain Wildflowers for the pine belt of our higher mountains.

      THE CALIFORNIA DESERTS

      The California deserts comprise a considerable area if we understand by them the region below the Yellow Pine, beginning in the north with the lower slopes of the Sierra Nevada and with a large part of the Inyo- White Range and its environs, and ending in the south with the Imperial Valley and the arid mountains to the west and the sandy region toward the Colorado River. Roughly and for practical purposes we can think of our desert as consisting of: (1) the more northern Mojave Desert reaching as far south as the Little San Bernardino and Eagle mountains and the ranges to the east, and (2) the more southern Colorado Desert. Being quite different from each other, these two deserts are worth short separate discussions.

      In the first place the Mojave Desert, except for the Death Valley region and that about Needles, lies mostly above 2000 feet. Hence, it has more rainfall and colder winters. It opens out largely toward the northeast and in many ways is an arm of die Great Basin of Utah and Nevada and its plant affinities often lie in that direction. The Colorado Desert, on the other hand, consists largely of the Saltón Basin, much of it near or below sea level. It opens toward the southeast and its affinity floristically is with Sonora and it is often placed as part of the Sonoran Desert. It is not surprising, then, that many species of the Mojave Desert extend into Nevada and southwestern Utah, while many of the Colorado Desert range into Sonora and western Texas. There are of course many patterns of more limited distribution, such as along the mountains bordering the western edge of the Colorado Desert from Palm Springs into northern Lower California, or around the western edge of the Mojave Desert from the base of the San Bernardino Mounntains to the Tehachapi region.

      The climatic conditions on the desert and the situation for plant growth are severe. Plants have had to resort to interesting devices to exist at all. In the first place, seeds of many of them have so-called inhibitors that prevent germination unless thoroughly leached out by more than a passing shower. This means that for many of them it takes a good soaking rain to get started, one that will wet the ground sufficiently for the seedling to send a root down below the very surface. A second characteristic of many of the annuals is that if the season is rather dry, they can form a few flowers even in a most depauperate condition and ripen a few seeds under quite trying circumstances. Thirdly, many of those plants that do live over from year to year, cut down evaporation by compactness—small fleshy leaves, reduced surface as in cacti—by coverings of hair or whitish materials that may reflect light and hence avoid heat, and by resinous or mucilaginous sap that will not give up its water content easily, as exemplified by Creosote Bush and cacti.

      A widespread popular fallacy should be mentioned. We read of the great depth to which desert plants can send their roots in order to tap deep underground sources of moisture. This situation is true along washes and watercourses and basins, where Mesquite and Palo Verde, for examples, send roots down immense distances, but on the open desert an annual rainfall of six or eight inches distributed over some months may moisten only the upper layers of soil. Therefore, shrubs like Creosote Bush and plants like cacti tend to have very superficial wide-spreading roots that can gather in what moisture becomes available.

      Something should be said too about summer rains. On the coastal slopes at elevations below the pine belt, we are accustomed to summer months practically without rain. But in Arizona and the region to the east of us there are two definite rainy seasons, the one producing a spring flora and the other a late summer and early autumn crop. For the most part the annuals that come into bloom in these two distinct seasons are quite different. Many summers the Arizona rains reach into the desert areas of California and sometimes produce veritable cloudbursts of water. At such times thunderheads appear over the adjacent mountains like the San Bernardino, San Jacinto, and San Gabriel ranges, and the neighboring coastal valleys are much more humid and uncomfortable than when the desert is dry. After these summer rains some of the perennials may exhibit new growth and flowering, and a new crop of annuals may appear, such as Chinchweed and Kallstroemia. I have seen the desert floor green with the last-named plant for miles in early September in the southern Mojave Desert west of Baker and Cronise Valley.

      As any desert habitué knows, plant life there is not uniform, but varies with elevation, drainage, character of soil, and the like. One of the characteristic features is the presence of many undrained basins, known locally as dry lakes, where water may gather in ususually wet years only to dry up more or less completely after a few weeks. Such a situation through the centuries brings about the accumulation of salts or alkali, making these areas too salty for any plant life, or at the fringes there may be an accumulation of species adapted to salty conditions, such as various members of the Pigweed Family: Saltbush, Shadscale, and Glass wort. These basins are scattered over the Mojave Desert and form a series along the old channel of the Mojave River which flows eventually into Death Valley, the largest of all. A similar situation exists in the area near the Saltón Sea.

      The great open plains and flats of much of the desert are covered with Creosote Bush (which is associated with Burroweed), Boxthorn, Incienso, and many other species. Here the average rainfall is from two to eight inches and summer temperatures may be very high. Some cacti grow in this region, which mostly is pretty well drained, but many are found on rocky canyon walls, in stony washes, and other places also. In areas above the Creosote Bush on the Mojave Desert, say from 2,500 feet to 4,000 or higher, Joshua Trees tend to distribute themselves in a sort of open woodland with lower shrubs in between. Here the annual precipitation may be from six to fifteen inches and the vegetation is correspondingly richer. And then, along the western edge of the Colorado Desert and more particularly in the mountains bordering on and situated in the Mojave Desert is a zone of Pinyon and Juniper, mostly at 5,000 to 8,000 feet. Here the annual precipitation runs about twelve to twenty inches a year, some of it as snow. This belt has some summer showers and some plants in bloom in the summer and even into fall, as well as in the spring, which comes later than in the Creosote Bush zone. Particularly in the more northern parts of the desert, Creosote Bush gives way in the upper elevations to Sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata and relatives), and large regions in Lassen, Mono, and northern Inyo counties have a Sagebrush desert like that of Nevada and Idaho. With so wide a diversity of conditions, then, it is not surprising to find quite different flowers at various altitudes and in various habitats.

      How TO IDENTIFY A WILDFLOWER

      FIGURE A. A REPRESENTATIVE FLOWER

      To refresh the readers memory, a drawing is presented (figure A) showing the parts of a typical flower, since in the text it is impossible to talk about plants and their flowers without using the names of some of the parts. In the typical flower we begin at the outside with the sepals, which are usually green although they may be colored. The sepals together constitute the calyx. Next comes the corolla made up of separate petals, or the petals may fuse forming a tubular or bell-shaped corolla. Usually it is the conspicuous part of the flower, but it

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