Abstract
THE popular impression of a desert as an endless plain of tawny sand, rainless, and utterly devoid of vegetation, or perhaps showing a distant oasis, bears but slight resemblance to the desert overlooked by the botanical laboratory near Tucson. Here considerable variety of vegetation prevails; in the streams and river aquatic plants flourish; along the river banks rise poplars and willows; on the alluvium of the “flood-plain” is mesquite-forest, in which acacias and another leguminous species, Prosopis velutina, live side by side with elder-trees and ash-trees; approaching the hills other types of vegetation appear in the dried water-courses, and on the gravelly and sandy slopes, in both of which sites grows the notorious creosote-bush (Larrea); while on the hills are found yet other plant-communities, including giant cacti and Fouquieria. In the winter and summer seasons of rainfall—scanty though this be—the scene changes like magic, for thousands of short-lived annual (ephemeral) herbs spring up and clothe the ground with fresh verdure that contrasts with the ashen or bluish-green tints of the bushes or bizarre succulents.
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GROOM, P. American Desert Vegetation 1 . Nature 83, 250–251 (1910). https://doi.org/10.1038/083250a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/083250a0