as the rose

(above photo: Joe Bennion)

Living in the desert

has taught me to go inside myself

for shade.

-Richard Shelton

Most of my river trips in recent years have taken me through the Grand Canyon in springtime or early summer, when riparian thickets and the benches above the river are as lush as they’ll ever be, in this land where any plant must get its growing and begetting done in prodigious bursts, taking advantage of some fluke flood or wet spell; or must grow slowly and defensively, biding its time and rationing its energy for the inevitability of long draught.

Launching in late September of this year I was happily surprised at how many plants were using the rains of early autumn to get in one more flowering or greening-up--though I was never quite sure, from flower to flower, whether what I was seeing was really in season for that species or simply a maverick plant, getting while the getting was good. For example I saw very few datura ready to bloom like this one, coiled, cocked and ready to go off that very night.

The moonflower, as it is also known, is part of the nightshade family and blooms by the dozen on early summer evenings. They are so tightly wound that when they unfurl it’s better than watching time-lapse photography on tv: the whole stem nods, like a horse ready to leap out of the box, and sometimes one even hears a popping sound like the cork out of a champagne bottle when the blossom bursts loose. The decadent, faintly citrus scent that they release on opening is intoxicating and powerful enough to turn one’s head a little; it draws in the sphinx moth, the datura’s primary pollinator. The sphinx moth lives out its entire life-cycle in thrall to the datura. In larval, horn-worm form it lives on the plant’s green-black leaves, eating enough of them and the toxins they contain (the same that if ingested or absorbed can kill or send men reeling in dangerous hallucinations) to render it bitter to predator birds. The worm’s skin is as tough as pig-snout so it can survive one beak-bite, and no bird would persist in trying to eat something so obviously poisonous. Thus the plant protects the worm, and when both have flowered in full the sphinx returns to service his spectral mistress. In the morning all that’s left of the assignation is the spent blossom, drooping like a sullied silken handkerchief.

(Flowers of Havasu, Lee Udall Bennion, 1992)

More benign flowers were also in evidence, like these monkey-flowers along the creek in Saddle Canyon.

I saw only two Hooker’s Evening Primroses in blossom during the 18 days of the trip;

but there was also the occasional flowering wild tobacco,

loco weed,

and desert senna.

In the lower part of the Canyon the ocotillo spindles were just beginning to green up, a sight that’s always like some biblical miracle--living leaves sprouting from a thorny staff.

During the five days of storm we experienced in the second half of the trip, all manner of tiny plants and lichens were going crazy and getting green on the rocks.

Even the cottonwoods were acting like it was springtime and sending forth all sorts of optimistic growth.

These fragmites reeds at Whitmore Wash were making a break for it across the sandbar, but nobody could fathom why.

Among the more poker-faced and stoic desert dwellers there's not so much fanfare after a big rain.

This virile barrel cactus in Tapeats Creek: always happy to see you whether it's been raining or not.

We were near the end of prickly-pear fruit season, and I’d have de-spined and eaten a few of these juicy-looking ones along the trail at Phantom Ranch if I hadn’t been in a hurry to mail my postcards and if they hadn’t been coated in mule-dust...

The bits of spitwad white you see on the pads of these prickly-pears are patches of cochineal, a parasitic insect whose crimson entrails and eggs were actually, for a few hundred years, the most valuable natural resource that the Spaniards exported back to the old world. It was harvested by the bale by indian slaves (with very tough fingers, I imagine) and the carminic acid therein could be rendered into a color-fast dye that was used in makeup and in the carmine robes of the Vatican, among other thing. Here’s a little painting I made in my notebook with a stick and some cochineal, to see what it would look like when dried. The color hasn’t changed at all from the moment I crushed it onto the paper.

Oftentimes and regardless of the season, the most evocative life forms one encounters in the Canyon are those that are spent, dormant or already dead.

Apache plume:

A century plant's dried stalk, strong as bleached bone:

And, as lying as still as the husk of any fallen plant, this bighorn ewe in Spring Canyon:

She'd be plant food by now if some spring flood hadn't lodged her so firmly in the middle of the phantom channel.

(above photo: Joe Bennion)

Near Lee's Ferry one can climb up from the river to spot where it seems an entire forest of trees lie in the sandstone, now exposed and weathering away to much the same result, though ever so much more slowly than if they hadn't been petrified, as this tree I saw in Nankoweap Creek, whose marrow is crumbling away like so much shale.

Most impressive of all the inanimate pretenders to the plant world are those that were never organic in the first place: false wood-graining in blocks of stone high up Tapeats Creek.