Photo: Teresa R. Hineline
Of all the plants in North America, few establish the sense of a place better than the ocotillo of the Southwestern deserts. In the landscape that Mary Austin called "the land of little rain," the moisture-sensitive ocotillo is a natural indicator of rainfall, growing its leaves when the rain comes and dropping them when they have done all that leaves can do with the scarce material at hand.
Ocotillo can be good neighbors; they get on well in association with communities of saguaro cactus, cholla cactus, and paloverde trees across the Arizona upland of the Sonoran desert. But they are just as likely to gather with other ocotillo in the absence of trees or cactus. In a variety of places across the Sonoran desert, ocotillo fill the field of view, climbing the bajada or dominating relatively flat land, as though attending a swank and exclusive cocktail party held in a very spacious ballroom.
A few facts: the latin name for ocotillo is Fouqueria splendens. The species has a close relative, the "boojum" (F. columnaris), found in Mexico, that displays surprisingly little family resemblance. Ocotillo support hummingbirds, but are pollinated primarily by bees. Ocotillos are not cacti.
In the presence of ocotillo, I tend to lose all pretense of scientific objectivity. It does little harm to anthropomorphize plant species, I think, as long as one lets them be. I get along with ocotillo the way that John Muir got on with the wildflowers of the high Sierra or that Martha Evans Martin looked at stars: they are my friends, and I want to get to know them all by their first names -- each and every one, across the vast Southwest.
It doesn't bother me so much that my affection is not reciprocated. The ocotillo's collective indifference to me and the fellows of my species suits. Ocotillo are zen masters and they look the part. Never mind that they are only found in the new world, and that zen is an Asian tradition. Plants refuse to obey the intellectual and cultural categories of human beings. Ocotillo are more zen than zen.
This, then, is how I answer the question: "what is an ocotillo?" But it raises other questions: Do they grow in fields? What do ocotillo have to do with the contents of this website?
Just so ... just so.
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