The chill of the desert winter remains in the air, but spring planting time is approaching rapidly. The last freezing nights of the season usually come by mid-March. The warm days stir the hearts of gardeners to seek out beautiful and unusual plants.
A desire to possess a little piece of paradise in our own back yard, alive with butterflies and hummingbirds, is creating a demand for plants (mostly natives) that attract these creatures.
Twice a year, one or two especially appealing plants are made available to the public at Tohono Chul Park's plant sale, often for the first time anywhere. Here are a few examples.
This spring's featured plant represents two years of "growout" from a single cutting on a cliff high in the mountains of Southeastern Arizona. The park's plant denotes one of the finest examples from the all-American genus Heuchera, or alum-root. Seven of its 36 species grow in Arizona.
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This unique clone of Heuchera sanguinea forms mounds of mottled, heart-shaped leaves up to 7 inches tall and eventually up to several feet across in the wild.
"Apache Mountain" coral bells produce sprays up to 18 inches tall of one-third of an inch glowing cerise, short, tubular flowers with white centers throughout the warm seasons when water is available.
Hummingbirds are highly attracted to the flowers. In the wild, plants grow at elevations ranging from from 4,000 to 8,500 feet in Arizona, New Mexico and northern Mexico.
The park has successfully grown Apache Mountain in pot culture, but its in-ground growth at lower elevations is still untested.
Few people know that a kind of cotton grows wild in the mountains near Tucson. Gossypium thurberi can be found at elevations from about 3,500 to 5,500 feet, often growing with grasses and evergreen oaks.
Wild cotton is a small, shrublike plant that rarely gets over 4 feet tall in the wild. Cream flowers with red spots at the petal bases appear in summer and fall, followed by half-inch bolls bearing lintless seeds.
The flowers attract insect pollinators, especially bees, while the very hard seeds are eaten by cardinals and pyrrhuloxias, whose heavy beaks can crack the seeds open.
Trying to find a winter-blooming hummingbird plant always presents a challenge. Two that can be used are cape honeysuckle, which freezes to the ground in cooler winters, and hummingbird trumpets (Zauschneria californica), which are really better fall or spring bloomers.
Another less frequently seen choice is Anisacanthus puberulus, sometimes called pink forsythia. Pink-lilac flowers cover the nearly leafless plants throughout the cool season.
Usually flowering ends around March or April, when lots of other hummingbird plants have started to bloom. As blooming slows, light green leaves appear and remain until the next fall. For the heaviest bloom, plant in full sun.
Western wallflower blooms with yellow spikes of flowers up to 4 feet tall in the spring. This Southern Arizona native makes a great contrast with the pinks and reds of our native penstemons. The plants live only a couple of years, but they reseed and volunteer in subsequent seasons.
Janusia gracilis grows wild in the desert around Tucson. The small vines usually go unnoticed, but following rainy periods they burst into growth and produce an abundance of little yellow flowers whose petals look like spoons. Janusia is a food plant for the larvae of the rare Asychis skipper butterfly.
One of the great things about using native plants is that they provide food and homes for native creatures that are being crowded into ever-shrinking natural habitats because of human activities.
If you want to go
● Tohono Chul Park's spring plant sale will present a wide variety of native and desert-adapted plants, as well as limited quantities of new, rare and one-of-a-kind native plants. The sale will be open only to park members from 3 to 6 p.m. March 9. It will be open to the public from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. March 11 and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. March 12.
