A field guide to the desert Southwest

Alkali sacaton

Sporobolus airoides

A robust warm-season bunchgrass forming stout, rounded tussocks topped by large, diffuse, pinkish seed panicles that catch the light like a fine mist. It thrives where few grasses can, colonizing alkaline flats and saline bottomlands.

✿ Blooms Jun – Sep

Alligator juniper

Juniperus deppeana

Instantly recognizable by its distinctive bark broken into square, gray plates like alligator hide, this rugged evergreen juniper forms broad, picturesque crowns on foothill and mountain slopes. It is among the largest and longest-lived junipers of the Southwest.

Apache plume

Fallugia paradoxa

A sprawling native shrub that carries white single-rose flowers and feathery pink seed-head plumes at the same time all summer — the plumes are the 'Apache' feathers the name refers to.

✿ Blooms Apr – Sep

Autumn sage

Salvia greggii

A compact, aromatic subshrub covered for months in small lipped flowers in shades of red, coral, pink, or white. A workhorse of Southwest gardens and a reliable draw for hummingbirds and bees.

✿ Blooms Mar – Nov

Banana yucca

Yucca baccata

A stout, low yucca with broad, stiff, blue-green sword leaves edged in curling fibers, topped in spring by dense clusters of waxy cream flowers. Its large fleshy, banana-like fruits were an important traditional food across the Southwest.

✿ Blooms Apr – Jun

Beavertail prickly pear

Opuntia basilaris

A low, clumping prickly pear with flat, spoon-shaped blue-gray to purple-tinged pads that look deceptively spineless but bristle with tufts of tiny barbed glochids. In spring it erupts in brilliant magenta to rose flowers, making it one of the showiest low-desert cacti.

✿ Blooms Mar – Jun

Big sagebrush

Artemisia tridentata

The aromatic silver-gray shrub that scents the high desert after rain. Its three-toothed leaves (tridentata) are unmistakable, and it anchors vast stretches of the northern NM steppe.

✿ Blooms Aug – Oct

Blackfoot daisy

Melampodium leucanthum

A tidy, low mound smothered for much of the year in small white daisies with sunny yellow centers, giving off a faint honey scent. One of the longest-blooming and most dependable native groundcovers of the Southwest.

✿ Blooms Mar – Oct

Blue grama

Bouteloua gracilis

New Mexico's state grass — a fine-textured warm-season bunchgrass whose seed heads hang sideways like little combs or eyelashes. The backbone of native shortgrass and a superb low-water lawn alternative.

✿ Blooms Jul – Sep

Blue palo verde

Parkinsonia florida

A graceful desert tree with smooth blue-green bark and branches that photosynthesize, briefly leafy and then smothered in a spectacular haze of yellow spring flowers. A classic Sonoran wash tree and important nurse plant for young saguaros.

✿ Blooms Mar – May

Brittlebush

Encelia farinosa

A rounded desert subshrub of silvery, felted leaves that erupts each spring into a cloud of long-stemmed golden daisies. A cheerful roadside and hillside pioneer that colonizes disturbed ground across the warm deserts.

✿ Blooms Mar – May

Broom snakeweed

Gutierrezia sarothrae

A small, dense, resinous subshrub that turns solid gold in fall alongside chamisa. An indicator of dry, disturbed, or overgrazed ground across the high desert.

✿ Blooms Aug – Oct

Buckhorn cholla

Cylindropuntia acanthocarpa

A shrubby, many-branched cholla whose stout, antler-like arms bristle with straw-colored spines and unfurl into showy yellow-to-bronze blooms each spring. It anchors bajadas and creosote flats across the Mojave and Sonoran deserts and offers nesting sites for cactus wrens.

✿ Blooms Apr – Jun

Cenizo

Leucophyllum frutescens

A rounded evergreen shrub with soft silvery-gray foliage that erupts in bell-shaped purple to magenta flowers after summer monsoon rains — earning it the nickname 'barometer bush.' A cornerstone shrub of Southwest xeriscapes.

✿ Blooms Jun – Oct

Century plant

Agave americana

A massive blue-gray rosette of thick, spine-tipped leaves that can sprawl six feet or more, a dramatic architectural anchor in warm-desert landscapes. After many years it sends up a towering asparagus-like flower stalk, blooms once, and dies.

✿ Blooms Jun – Aug

Christmas cholla

Cylindropuntia leptocaulis

A wispy, intricately branched cholla with slender pencil-thin green stems that lace through desert shrubs, nearly invisible until small greenish flowers give way to brilliant red berries that ripen in winter. Those festive scarlet fruits give it its common name.

✿ Blooms May – Aug

Chuparosa

Justicia californica

A sprawling, nearly leafless green-stemmed shrub of washes and low desert that lights up with tubular red-orange flowers, a premier cool-season hummingbird plant. Its name means hummingbird sipper in Spanish.

✿ Blooms Jan – Dec

Claret cup cactus

Echinocereus triglochidiatus

A mounding hedgehog cactus that lights up with waxy scarlet cup flowers in late spring — one of the few cacti hardy enough for the cold high desert and a top hummingbird plant.

✿ Blooms Apr – Jun

Cliffrose

Purshia stansburiana

A gnarled, semi-evergreen shrub of rocky rimrock and slopes that erupts in fragrant, pale-yellow to creamy rose-like flowers in spring, later trailing feathery, twisted seed plumes. Its resinous, tiny lobed leaves and shreddy bark give it a wind-sculpted, ancient look.

✿ Blooms Apr – Jun

Creosote bush

Larrea tridentata

The dominant evergreen shrub of the American warm deserts, with small resinous olive-green leaves that release the unmistakable smell of rain, and cheerful yellow flowers followed by fuzzy white seed capsules. One of the longest-lived plants on Earth.

✿ Blooms Feb – May

Deergrass

Muhlenbergia rigens

A large, fountain-like bunchgrass that erupts in a dense mound of arching gray-green leaves pierced by tall, narrow, spike-like seed stalks. A favorite landscape accent that anchors garden borders and streambanks, traditionally harvested for basketry.

✿ Blooms Aug – Oct

Desert globemallow

Sphaeralcea ambigua

A mounding perennial with gray-green, felted leaves and cup-shaped flowers in glowing apricot-orange (sometimes pink, red, or white). A tough, cheerful bloomer that colors desert washes and roadsides in spring.

✿ Blooms Mar – Jun

Desert marigold

Baileya multiradiata

A short-lived mound of woolly gray-green foliage that floats bright lemon-yellow daisies on slender stalks for much of the warm season. A tough, self-seeding wildflower that lines desert roadsides after rains.

✿ Blooms Mar – Oct

Desert spoon

Dasylirion wheeleri

A symmetrical fountain of narrow blue-gray, saw-toothed blades that in maturity sends up a tall dried-flower stalk. An architectural anchor plant of southern NM and a source of the distilled spirit sotol.

✿ Blooms Jun – Jul

Desert willow

Chilopsis linearis

Not a true willow — a small desert tree with willow-like leaves and orchid-shaped pink-to-burgundy trumpet flowers that hummingbirds work all summer. A signature of washes and low-elevation NM landscapes.

✿ Blooms May – Sep

Desert zinnia

Zinnia grandiflora

A low, spreading mat of fine green foliage covered through the hot months in bright golden-yellow daisies that age to papery tan. A drought-proof little groundcover for the toughest sunbaked spots.

✿ Blooms Jun – Oct

Engelmann's prickly pear

Opuntia engelmannii

The broad blue-green paddle cactus with yellow-to-orange flowers and edible magenta fruit (tunas). The most widespread prickly pear across southern and central NM.

✿ Blooms Apr – Jun

Fairy duster

Calliandra eriophylla

A low, airy shrub with fine, ferny compound leaves that erupts in feathery pink-to-rose flower puffs made of long stamens, a favorite of hummingbirds in the lower and southern Southwest. It brings soft color to desert slopes and washes in late winter and spring.

✿ Blooms Feb – May

Firecracker penstemon

Penstemon eatonii

An upright spring wildflower sending up wands of tubular, brilliant scarlet-red flowers above a basal rosette of glossy green leaves. A hummingbird magnet that lights up desert gardens and roadsides just as spring warms.

✿ Blooms Mar – Jun

Fishhook barrel cactus

Ferocactus wislizeni

A stout, ribbed barrel armed with hooked red spines that leans toward the southwest with age, topped in late summer by a crown of orange-to-yellow flowers and, later, yellow pineapple-like fruit. A rugged sculptural fixture of desert slopes.

✿ Blooms Jul – Sep

Fishhook pincushion

Mammillaria grahamii

A small, solitary barrel studded with white radial spines and one to several hooked, fishhook-like central spines, easily overlooked among desert rocks. After summer rains it circles its crown with a tidy ring of pink, funnel-shaped flowers, later followed by slender red fruits.

✿ Blooms May – Aug

Fountain grass

Cenchrus setaceus

A tufted bunchgrass with arching, wiry leaves and eye-catching purplish to coppery bottlebrush plumes. Widely sold as an ornamental, it is a non-native invasive that escapes landscaping into wildlands, crowding out natives and carrying fire through desert that rarely burned before.

✿ Blooms May – Oct

Fourwing saltbush

Atriplex canescens

A gray-green evergreen shrub named for the papery four-winged seeds that clothe the female plants into winter. One of the most salt- and drought-tolerant natives, thriving where little else will.

✿ Blooms Jun – Aug

Gambel oak

Quercus gambelii

A deciduous, often thicket-forming oak with lobed leaves that blaze russet and gold in autumn, forming the dense 'oak brush' that carpets foothills and canyon slopes across the Southwest. It anchors soil, feeds wildlife with acorns, and shifts between a shrub and a small gnarled tree depending on site.

✿ Blooms Apr – May

Goathead

Tribulus terrestris

A ground-hugging annual that spreads flat mats of trailing stems with paired, ferny leaves and small yellow flowers. This non-native invasive is notorious for the hard, sharp-horned burrs it drops — spiny seed cases that puncture bike tires, injure bare feet and pet paws, and hitchhike everywhere.

✿ Blooms Apr – Oct

Honey mesquite

Prosopis glandulosa

A deep-rooted legume tree of southern NM with fine feathery leaves, fragrant cream flower spikes, and sugary seed pods. Fixes nitrogen, casts filtered shade, and fuels the classic mesquite smoke.

✿ Blooms Apr – Jun

Indian ricegrass

Achnatherum hymenoides

A delicate cool-season bunchgrass whose airy, wide-spreading flower panicles float above fine, threadlike leaves like a shimmering haze. Its plump, nutritious seeds were a staple food for Southwestern peoples and remain prized winter forage.

✿ Blooms May – Jul

Joshua tree

Yucca brevifolia

The iconic branching tree-yucca of the Mojave, with shaggy forked limbs tipped by dense clusters of stiff, dagger-like leaves and knobby greenish-white spring flower heads. It defines the Mojave skyline and anchors an ecosystem of birds, lizards, and its obligate yucca-moth pollinator.

✿ Blooms Feb – Apr

Lechuguilla

Agave lechuguilla

A clumping agave of stiff, upright, spine-tipped leaves that form tight rosettes carpeting limestone slopes — the classic indicator plant of the Chihuahuan Desert. Once in its life it sends up a tall flowering spike of yellow-to-purplish blooms before the rosette dies, leaving pups to carry on.

✿ Blooms May – Jul

Mexican gold poppy

Eschscholzia californica subsp. mexicana

A spring ephemeral that carpets desert slopes in sheets of glowing golden-orange cups above lacy blue-green foliage after a wet winter. In a good year it turns whole hillsides to gold.

✿ Blooms Feb – Apr

Mormon tea

Ephedra viridis

A stiff, broom-like shrub of slender bright-green, nearly leafless jointed stems that photosynthesize in place of foliage, common on dry mesas and rocky slopes. Its clean architectural form stays green year-round in the high desert.

Mountain mahogany

Cercocarpus montanus

A tough, upright deciduous shrub of rocky slopes, prized for the silvery, spiraling feathery plumes that trail from its seeds and catch the light like curls of smoke. Its small wedge-shaped leaves and dense form make it a quiet backbone of foothill chaparral.

✿ Blooms Apr – Jun

New Mexico agave

Agave neomexicana

A compact, cold-hardy agave forming tidy gray-green rosettes with dark spine-tipped leaves, native to the grasslands and rocky slopes of New Mexico and adjacent regions. In summer it throws a branched flower stalk with yellow blooms before the parent rosette dies.

✿ Blooms Jun – Jul

Ocotillo

Fouquieria splendens

A fan of long, thorny, whip-like canes that leaf out green after rain and go bare in drought, tipped in spring with brilliant crimson flame-shaped flower clusters. A signature silhouette of Sonoran and Chihuahuan hillsides and a hummingbird magnet.

✿ Blooms Mar – Jun

One-seed juniper

Juniperus monosperma

The gnarled, multi-trunked juniper that with piñon defines the NM foothills 'PJ' woodland. Blue berry-like cones feed birds through winter; a slow, nearly indestructible native.

Pale wolfberry

Lycium pallidum

A spiny, spreading shrub with pale blue-green leaves and nodding, greenish-cream to lavender-tinged tubular flowers that give way to reddish berries. Often found around old dwellings and archaeological sites, it hums with hummingbirds and bees in spring.

✿ Blooms Apr – Jun

Parry’s agave

Agave parryi

A tight, almost geometric rosette of chalky blue-gray leaves edged with dark teeth and tipped by a single black spine. One of the most cold-hardy agaves — native to the mountains of the Southwest — and a sculptural anchor for high-desert gardens.

✿ Blooms Jun – Aug

Piñon pine

Pinus edulis

New Mexico's state tree — a compact, rounded pine that produces the prized piñon nut in good years. Paired with juniper across millions of acres of high desert.

Plains prickly pear

Opuntia polyacantha

A low, sprawling, mat-forming prickly pear whose green pads are densely armored with long, spreading spines. Exceptionally cold-hardy, it ranges from high-desert grasslands far up into the plains and mountain West, brightening spring with waxy yellow flowers.

✿ Blooms May – Jul

Ponderosa pine

Pinus ponderosa

A stately, long-needled pine whose thick, plated bark smells of vanilla or butterscotch in the sun and glows cinnamon-orange on mature trunks. It defines the open, park-like forests of the Southwest's mid-to-high elevations.

Rainbow hedgehog cactus

Echinocereus rigidissimus

A solitary, cylindrical hedgehog cactus whose dense, comb-like spines form alternating bands of pink, white, and rust that spiral up the stem like a rainbow. In late spring it crowns itself with large, silky magenta flowers with paler throats — one of the desert's most photographed miniatures.

✿ Blooms Apr – Jun

Red yucca

Hesperaloe parviflora

A grassy clump of arching, blue-green succulent leaves that sends up tall wands of coral-pink tubular flowers for months, one of the top hummingbird plants in Southwest landscapes. Despite the name it is not a true yucca.

✿ Blooms May – Sep

Rio Grande cottonwood

Populus deltoides wislizeni

The great gallery tree of the bosque — massive, spreading cottonwoods whose golden fall color lines the Rio Grande. A true riparian species that needs a water table or a ditch, not a dry yard.

✿ Blooms Mar – Apr

Rubber rabbitbrush

Ericameria nauseosa

The quintessential late-summer roadside shrub of northern New Mexico — silvery, flexible stems topped by a haze of golden flowers that carry the mesa gold from August into October.

✿ Blooms Aug – Oct

Russian thistle

Salsola tragus

A bushy, much-branched annual with slender reddish-striped stems and needle-tipped leaves that form a rounded skeleton by fall. This non-native invasive dries, snaps off at the base, and tumbles across the landscape scattering tens of thousands of seeds, piling against fences and fueling fires.

✿ Blooms Jun – Oct

Sacahuista

Nolina microcarpa

A large, grasslike mound of long, narrow, arching leaves with finely toothed edges, forming a fountain on rocky Southwest slopes. In early summer it sends up plumes of tiny creamy flowers well above the foliage.

✿ Blooms May – Jul

Sacred datura

Datura wrightii

A sprawling, gray-green mound with huge white, trumpet-shaped flowers that open at dusk and perfume the night to attract hawkmoths. Dramatic and beautiful — but every part is dangerously poisonous.

✿ Blooms May – Oct

Saguaro

Carnegiea gigantea

The towering, many-armed giant that defines the Sonoran Desert, its pleated green column crowned in late spring with waxy white flowers. A slow-growing keystone that shelters and feeds desert wildlife for well over a century.

✿ Blooms May – Jun

Saltcedar

Tamarix ramosissima

A feathery, gray-green shrub or small tree with tiny scale-like leaves and showy pink to whitish flower plumes. A non-native invasive that forms dense thickets choking Southwest rivers, guzzling groundwater and salting the soil so native cottonwoods and willows can't compete.

✿ Blooms Apr – Sep

Santa-Rita prickly pear

Opuntia santa-rita

A striking upright prickly pear whose round blue-gray pads flush vivid purple to lavender under cold and drought stress. Bright yellow spring flowers against the purple pads make it a prized ornamental of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan borderlands.

✿ Blooms Apr – Jun

Scarlet bugler

Penstemon barbatus

Tall wands of tubular scarlet flowers held above a basal rosette, timed to the summer hummingbird migration. One of the easiest and most rewarding native penstemons for the high desert.

✿ Blooms Jun – Sep

Scarlet globemallow

Sphaeralcea coccinea

A low, spreading perennial with grayish deeply cut leaves and abundant apricot-to-brick-orange mallow flowers through the warm months. A tough, cheerful groundcover for hot exposed ground.

✿ Blooms Apr – Sep

Sideoats grama

Bouteloua curtipendula

A warm-season bunchgrass named for the row of small oat-like seed spikes that dangle uniformly along one side of each arching stem, often flushed with orange and purple anthers. The Texas state grass and a tough, palatable forage grass.

✿ Blooms Jul – Sep

Soaptree yucca

Yucca elata

A slender tree-yucca topped with a rounded head of narrow, grass-like blue-green leaves and towering summer spikes of creamy bell-shaped flowers. A signature plant of Chihuahuan Desert grasslands, its saponin-rich roots were long pounded into soap (amole).

✿ Blooms May – Jul

Soapweed yucca

Yucca glauca

A low rosette of narrow blue-green blades that throws a tall spike of creamy bell flowers in early summer, pollinated exclusively by the yucca moth. Common on grassland and mesa across NM.

✿ Blooms May – Jul

Teddy bear cholla

Cylindropuntia bigelovii

A small treelike cholla whose densely silver-spined joints glow when backlit, giving a deceptively soft, fuzzy look. Its detachable segments cling ferociously to anything that brushes them, earning the 'jumping cholla' name.

✿ Blooms Feb – May

Tree cholla

Cylindropuntia imbricata

The upright, many-armed cholla that dots NM grasslands, with magenta flowers in early summer and persistent yellow tubercled fruit. Dead stems dry into the hollow 'cholla wood' sold in curio shops.

✿ Blooms May – Jul

Winterfat

Krascheninnikovia lanata

A soft, low, silvery-white shrub whose woolly, star-haired foliage and fluffy seed tufts glow almost luminous in late-season light, blanketing flats and mesas in silver. Its dense winter seed heads give it both its name and its value as cold-season forage.