Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Wild Flowers!

~Education Coordinator - Marcie Rodriguez

The museum’s grounds have been full of life this wildflower season. We have seen a wondrous variety of flowers appearing, and would like to share a few with you:

These small purple flowers are known as “purple mat”. They only grow to be about 3 inches high off the ground, and like gravelly or sandy areas.

Our prickly pears have begun to flower as well. Both the fruit that these flowers will produce and the paddles of the prickly pear are edible.  

The small white flowers are “popcorn flowers”, and are named so because when they bloom they look like bunches of popcorn. They are in the “forget-me-not” family, and there are 65 species of them worldwide!

Creosote bushes can be found all over our corner of the desert. There is a creosote ring in the Mojave that is estimated to be 11, 700 years old, and is one of the oldest organisms on the planet.


The Mojave Indigo Bush has beautiful dark indigo flowers that contrast wonderfully with the olive leaves. They can be found in the Mojave, Colorado, and the Great Basin Deserts, along with the northern section of the Sonoran Desert.