We’ve been very busy since our last post!  It’s monsoon season here, which means everything is starting to flower all at once.  The desert landscape certainly gets a lot greener when you add water, and some locations we’ve been to many times look unfamiliar now that they’re covered in thriving, blooming plants.  This has been a great year for desert marigold (Baileya multiradiata).  Driving into the Bootheel area, we saw what looked like two big yellow seas on the horizon.  Overcome with curiosity, we walked about a mile to find that they were acre-wide expanses of densely-packed marigolds.

Naturally, with all of the flowering, there are more and more seed collections to do.  While we were struggling to get one or two collections a week in July, now there are so many seeds to collect that it’s becoming hard to keep up.  Not to mention, now we have to be careful to keep the truck from getting stuck in the mud.

We have also been busy helping with other projects going on around the office.  The most consuming of these has been the search for the rare scurfpea near the Hatchet Mountains. This includes long days of walking miles of transect lines with many BLM staff.  So far, we’ve found a few snakes, lizards, and many crickets, but no surf peas.  It’s interesting to see what the job of a rare plants botanist is like, but it’s satisfying to get back to seed collecting, where we can see the physical results of our work.