The desert offers a second outburst of flowering in September and October, after the customary summer rains. This is the time of the globe mallow, or pink-eye poppy as it’s also known, and rabbit brush, a stinking shrub with a showy display of yellow bloom, and the sunflowers—acres and acres of waist-high mule-ear (so named for the shape of the leaves) Helianthus annuus, visible from miles away.

Down in dank and shady places grows a shady customer—moonflower, angel’s-trumpet, the sacred Datura meteloides. A large gross ivory-colored thing, set amid dark and shiny green leaves, the whole plant, flowers, stem, leaves, roots, is rich in scopolamine, a potent alkaloid much prized by witch doctors. The correct dosage is said to be spiritually rewarding, but the problem is that a microgram too much may lead to convulsions, paralysis and death—also rewarding, perhaps, but usually considered premature.

I try to think of a favorite among my arid-country flowers. But I love them all. How could we be true to one without being false to all the others? Just the same I think I’ll praise a few more individuals here, single them out from among the crowd.

The cliffrose, for example. A flowering shrub, Cowania mexicana, a true member of the rose family, the cliffrose can be found in many parts of the mesa country and high desert from Colorado to California. The shrub may grow from four to twelve feet high. Twisted and gnarled like a juniper, it is relatively inconspicuous most of the year. But in April and May it blooms, putting out a thick, showy cluster of pale yellow or cream-colored flowers with the fragrance of orange blossoms. On a breezy day in spring you can smell the faint, delicate but heart-intoxicating sweetness for miles. The cliffrose is a bold plant, flourishing in the most improbable places, clinging to the cliff’s edge, overhanging the rim of a plateau, gracing the pockets of sand far out among the slickrock domes. Deer, bighorn sheep, domestic sheep and cattle all browse on the leaves of this plant in the winter, when little else is available.

Or how about the wild morning glory, Evolvulus arizonicus? Another beauty. A hardy annual that blooms from April to October. The flowers are small, scarcely half an inch in diameter, but of so clear and striking an azure blue, especially in contrast to the tiny leaves and scraggly stems of the plant itself, that they assert themselves—against the sun-bleached background of sand and rock—with eye-catching vigor.

Several varieties of lupine grow in the desert. In Arizona the violet-purple Lupinus sparsiflorus, in western Texas the blue-purple L. havardii, in southwest California the royal-purple L. odoratus. Bushy members of the pea family, the lupines generally grow from two to three feet tall in clusters along roadways, trails and the edges of valley bottoms, wherever the runoff from rains tends to be a little heavier. Sometimes they grow in pure stands, turning the burnt umber and dun brown of the desert into a wind-shimmering lake of blue-pink-purple radiance. The lupine is not good for anything bankable; hungry livestock eat them, get sick and die (alkaloids). All they have to offer us is their own rare beauty.