The Cactus Garden

The saguaros get all the attention out here, and fair enough — but look closer at the hillsides as you drive, because this is a whole crowded garden of desert plants, every one of them with a clever trick for surviving the dry.

See those trees with the strange green bark and the feathery leaves? That's palo verde — the name means "green stick" in Spanish — and it's the state tree of Arizona. Here's its trick: when the drought gets bad, it drops its little leaves entirely and photosynthesizes right through its green bark, so it can keep living on almost no water. Then there's the ocotillo — those clusters of long, thorny, whip-like canes that look dead most of the year, until the rains come and, almost overnight, they leaf out green and tip themselves with flame-red flowers. And watch out for the cholla — that's the fuzzy, pale, jointed cactus, and one kind's called the "teddy bear" cholla because it looks so soft and huggable. Do not touch it. Those joints are armored in wickedly barbed spines that detach at the lightest brush and are the very devil to get out — folks call it the "jumping" cholla because it seems to leap onto you. Add in the prickly pear with its flat pads and purple fruit, the gray-green brittlebush that goes gold with bloom, and the hard old ironwood trees, and you've got it: a desert that from a distance looks bare and brown, but up close is packed shoulder to shoulder with tough, ingenious, spiny life. Enjoy the garden as you climb.