‘Spectacular’ Mojave Desert bloom underway
The Mojave Desert’s iconic Joshua trees are blooming like crazy and, although theories abound, there is little consensus about why it’s happening.
From Joshua Tree National Park and into Nevada and Arizona, millions of the trees bear foot-long conical bundles of tightly packed, greenish-white flowers at the ends of their spiky branches.
What’s remarkable this year, experts say, is that just about every tree has bloomed or is flowering now, with fragrant bundles at the tips of just about every branch. Biologists and other said they can’t recall a year when the Joshua trees had more abundant flowers. Typically not all plants bloom, and those that do produce far fewer flower heads.
At Cima Dome, an area southeast of Baker that has the largest concentration of Joshua trees anywhere, the trees are resplendent.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon,” said Cameron Barrows, a UC Riverside researched ecologist who studies the species.
http://www.pe.com/local-news/topics/topics-environment-headlines/20130408-joshua-trees-spectacular-mojave-desert-bloom-underway.ece
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...on Joshua trees this year. Interesting. The creosote was also blooming abundantly, and we saw lots of Hesperocallis undulata:
and parasitic Orobanche cooperi:
