Dramatic blossoms fill the Chihuahuan desert.  Our regal agaves, better known as Century plants stretch stalks laden with dozens of ochre bouquets fifteen feet skyward. Spanish daggers lavish the foothills with spikes of orchid-like white blooms. Prickly pear and other cactus flower the mountains and the alkaline lowlands with an unapologetic riot of pinks, reds and yellows. We see prickly poppy waving its large and elegant white flower; tall penstemons whispering delicate pastel hues; wild verbena weaving a carpet of purple; Indian paintbrush painting splashes of red-orange along roadways. Though loathed by ranchers, even the legume locoweed produces splendidly colorful lavendar blossoms that resemble faded bluebonnets. (Oh, do we have bluebonnets.) And the multi-armed cholla sends forth such a mass of fushia blossoms that the underlying mountains seem to be auditioning for a slot in the Rose Bowl Parade. There's diversity out here to rival any greenhouse garden, and then some.

Trouble is, unless we get more than our allotted dollop of rain, we don't get to enjoy all of these flowers each spring. It's like they hold an annual drawing to decide which of them will be the season's star bloomer. Maybe the desert can support splendor from only one plant at a time. Maybe they simply enjoy not sharing the spotlight.
Whatever the reason, it seems like each spring, one desert species explodes into blooming supernovae while less fortunate flowers struggle into being.  Last year we marveled over the Spanish daggers and all their yucca kin. The year before, we admired the magnificence of mile after mile of Century plants in lush bloom.

This year belongs to the ocotillo.

An ocotillo is a spiny, twisted jumble of unbranching stalks, each rarely more than an inch or so in diameter.  Except for being a gangly ten or twelve feet tall, an ocotillo plant resembles one of those dessicated, starkly bare-root rose bushes sheathed in plastic. (You know—those cheap, half-dead bushes you periodically buy to prove your optimism.) Ocotillos spend most of their lives brown and leafless. Most people probably dismiss standing ocotillos as pathetic remnants of dead something-or-others doomed to life in an unfortunate location. Even when the plant greens up and fingernail-sized leaves finally break out up and down its collection of stalks, an ocotillo seems more dead than alive. I often add an ocotillo or two to Big Bend landscapes in compositional need of a vertical element. (Except for mountains, there isn't much else out here that breaks the horizon.)

But the blossoms! Oh, my. A blooming ocotillo looks like God swept through the desert and stuck scarlet bottle brushes to the end of each dry stalk while no one was looking. Magnificent in its spareness, embarrassing in its color, an ocotillo in bloom is one of those twists of nature that makes a walk in the desert overflow the senses.

I've spent much of my lifetime sneaking up on ocotillos in bloom. Seeing one in full bloom feels sort of like finding a hundred dollar bill in the forest. The more you think about it, the more you know you deserve to enjoy it.

I spend most of my creative life doing pastels. That's by choice. I like the feel of pigment on my fingers, like the challenge of layering color over color, like the planning that must precede each stroke. I loved the Century plants that year, and I painted them in pastel. I loved the Dagger blossoms last year. I painted them in pastel. The plants relate, the paintings relate.  I loved the year of the chollo blossom, and I painted them in pastel. Green spears with thorns and bright, rose-like blossoms. Same joy.
I loved this spring's unusually magnificent outpouring of red ocotillo brushes.
They relate to nothing. Brown stalks with incongruously vibrant brushy-feathered odd-shaped things stuck to the tips like something a first-grader would draw.
They relate to everything.

Seeing ocotillo in bloom is a spirit-gift.
I painted them in oils, not because oils are more serious than pastels—if anything, the opposite is true. I painted them in oils because I usually do pastels.
Nothing in nature says you must do things the same way every time. It's like at the Annual Meeting of the Desert Plants: Choose one, and all will be lovely; change to a different one sometimes, and all will be special. 


OCOTILLO AT SAN JACINTO PEAK    by Lindy C Severns       
                                                  9" x 12" oil on archival Russian linen
available at Kiowa Gallery Alpine, TX    June 2008  ~ about $750 framed