Credit: Linda & Dr. Buscher

Another shrub that flowers stunningly throughout the desert spring is the creosote bush, Larrea tridentata. The intense yellow flowers and white, fluffy seed pods are a lovely contrast to the plant’s waxy green leaves. Creosote bushes have actually adjusted to the dry desert environment by opening their stomatas just to “breathe” in co2 in the morning hours. This permits the most affordable possible loss of water to get away through the stomatas. It is the oils on the leaves of the typical creosote bush that produces the special “smell of rain” in the Sonoran Desert, as the rainwater combines with these unpredictable oils. These leaf oils are a mix made up mainly of terpene (found in pines), limonene (found in citrus) camphor (found in rosemary), methanol and spices referred to as 2-undecanone.