Our Sonoran Acre

Some years ago I half-heartedly counted the saguaros in our yard. That was before I cleared paths to the north and south corners.

With the clearing, I've planted lots of agave shoots as well as a few plants purchased from local nurseries. But almost all of the flora on our acre is native.

I conducted a survey of trees on our Sonoran acre, pen and paper in hand. If you count giant saguaro cacti as trees, there are well over a hundred trees on our acre.

There are about forty-eight saguaros of varying sizes. About half are bigger than a person. Many are giant.

There are over fifty palo verdes big enough to be recognised as trees, and another thirty-three acacias.

Some acacias are bushes, but one sweet acacia is a huge tree. It was this huge, gnarly sweet acacia that didn't bear leaves one year. That made me water it, then clear the first path into Coat Hanger Valley. That struggling old acacia and a neglected cholla cactus on the far west rim of the gully were my motivation to clear the south half of our acre.

Mesquites are few. They prefer to grow in the washes and we are mostly on a rocky hillock. The water flow in our little gully, Coat Hanger Valley, is blocked by the house and the driveway.

Mesquites grow about 25 feet tall, but they are thirsty with roots growing some 200 feet deep. Of the six on our acre, all but one were planted by human hands. Our one native mesquite is on the east slope of Coat Hanger Valley. It was struggling until I discovered it covered by creosote brush and hidden by a huge saguaro. I have been watering it for a couple of years and it is growing very nicely with new foliage.

Also among the planted are three huge eucalyptus trees, five purple lavender, a white snowball flower thingie, and a desert willow.

We had two large queen palms in the back yard, but they didn't survive freezes and my irregular watering regimen.

I wondered how many century plants there are. These are the agave americanus which serves as the "coat of arms" for Pima County. The century plant is also the same agave from which tequila is made. I counted a hundred and fifty mature plants before I gave up. There are over two hundred, more than enough to harvest and make pulque, fermented mash that's a sort of a gut-dissolving beer that is a popular accompaniment to the scores of mariachi bands in Plaza Garibaldi, Mexico City. But I will pass on that idea.

We also have about fourteen octopus agaves planted in the yard, most from the one that flowered about three or four years ago. The plant grows a single, tall spike with hundreds if not thousand of flowers on its top segment. The flowers turn into hundreds of baby plants, right on the spike, that you can pick off and plant in the dirt.

The smaller green agaves are too numerous to count, but there are six desert spoon (sotol) agaves that we planted and there are about twenty barrel cacti, some of them very large specimens. 

Several plants vie for the honor of being revered as grandparents.  Barrel cactus and catclaw acacia can live for over 130 years. Ocotillo (I've planted four) and saguaros live over 200 years. But the honor goes to the creosote bush. We have lots of them all over our acre. No one is sure how long they can live, but it's at least twelve thousand years.

So if anyone thinks there's not much growing in the Sonoran Desert, come see.