Featured Plants

We are very lucky to be living in the center of Lucy’s Warblers’ breeding range. These tiny, shy, gray birds are the only cavity-nesting warblers in Arizona and the only ones nesting in low elevation Sonoran Desert, likely because of their fondness for native mesquite trees. With the decline of...

Some people are always looking for low-water-use native plants that attract hummingbirds or butterflies; others search for plants to help with the declining bee populations. So when a water-thrifty native plant covered in bees, butterflies AND hummingbirds, all at the same time, it’s definitely worth talking about. The fantastic plant...

Traveling east of Tucson on I-10 there are a lot of expansive views of mountains and valleys that make up part of the basin and range district of Southern Arizona, Southern New Mexico and Northern Mexico. Although this trip is not necessarily ugly, it’s also not very memorable. There is...

Three weeks after the onset of the summer rains, in a wash southeast of the Huachuca mountains, the coyote gourds grow. Mexico is less than two miles away. The air is filled with the sounds of birds. Since the first rains, numerous tuberous perennials (plants of diverse origins that have...