It's November in the desert around Tucson. And every time a fluffy white seed floats by me, I remember my first encounter with the source of that seed - desert broom, the native plant that people love to hate. Back then, I was living in a falling-down frame-and-stucco home northwest of Tucson on a corner where two dirt roads intersected. Life was good - I was making money playing music five and six nights a week in bars along Speedway and taking college courses in wildlife biology. At one point, the band members gave me an ultimatum: Did I want to spend my nights chasing kangaroo rats in the desert or did I want to make $30 a night and all the beer I could drink? Well, I kept some of the books I'd purchased for classes and spent part of my daylight hours trying to learn the plants and animals that lived in the desert that surrounded my funky hacienda. One November day in that desert, I remember walking up a wide arroyo and coming upon blankets of white fluff. Growing along the banks were huge green plants 6 feet tall and easily as wide. That fluff floated off the plants and created drifts where it blew into low-hanging blue palo verde branches. I remember thinking that those huge plants sure looked like a weed that I was always pulling out of my yard and garden. Those plants - and the pesky weed - were desert broom, a native that is very good at producing vast amounts of seed that will germinate anywhere the earth has been disturbed. That makes for a lot of desert broom plants coming up as new homes spread into a cleared desert. Probably one of the most common customer questions in a retail nursery is: "I hate desert broom. How do you kill it?" It may be in a tie with "What do you have that the rabbits won't eat?" Desert broom is in the sunflower family, and the scientific name is Baccharis sarothroides. The genus is after the god of wine, Bacchus, because it is rumored that the roots of one species were used to flavor wine. The specific epithet sarothroides means it is similar to a plant called Sarothra, now Hypericum, which is St. Johns Wort, an herbal remedy for people depressed by too many desert brooms coming up as weeds in their yard. Because it's evergreen and makes a nice small shrub at 6 feet high and wide and seems to accept any soil type, desert broom can actually be a great landscape plant. The secret is that desert broom plants come as male or female. The female plant produces all the fluffy born seed. Nurseries grow male plants from cuttings, and that's what you need to ask for if you want to use a tough native plant for a large splash of green in your landscape or a good evergreen barrier to screen your neighbor's car collection. Walk into a nursery and say, "I want a male Baccharis sarothroides for my yard. I love that native plant." Me, too.

 

● Peter Gierlach has been growing native plants for 25 years and is the director of Native Plant Outreach for the Tucson Botanical Gardens.