Creosote Bush - fragrance of the desert
- By Susan Tweit
- Published 01/8/2003
- Outdoors
- Unrated
Susan Tweit
Susan J. Tweit is a scientist who evolved into an award-winning writer and radio commentator. She is the author of five books for adults, including Barren, Wild, & Worthless: Living in the Chihuahuan Desert, personal stories about the history and natural history of Southern New Mexico, The Great Southwest Nature Factbook, a browser's guide to nature in the Southwest, from A to Z, and Seasons in the Desert: A Naturalist's Notebook, from Chronicle books. She has also written two children's books, Meet the Wild Southwest: Land of Hoodoos & Gila Monsters (Alaska Northwest Books) and City Foxes, a picture book which was named one of the Outstanding Science Books for Children for 1998.
Her "Wild Lives" radio commentaries are heard three times weekly on KRWG-FM, Southern New Mexico public radio, and her columns run in the Las Cruces Sun News. Susan's essays and stories have appeared in Harrowsmith Country Life, New Mexico, Sierra, Cricket, Bloomsbury Review, and other magazines. She is the co-founder of Las Cruces' wildly popular - and fun - Border Book Festival. She is currently living in Colorado with her husband, Richard Cabe, and dog, Perdida Imelda.
Susan is a popular public speaker and leader of workshops. Her stories of our natural and human history have captivated a wide variety of audiences, including school classes, workshops, banquets, and professional meetings. As Bloomsbury Review put it, she brings the precision of a scientist and the passion of a poet, and is able to refocus readers' vision and ignite their imaginations.
Susan has a new web site! She invites you to come visit. Her books are available there, at local bookstores, or on-line through http://BarnesandNoble.com and http://Amazon.com (search by author for Susan Tweit).
Creosote bush is hard to miss in Southern New Mexico - its wiry form and sparse olive-green foliage are often all you see on alluvial fans, mesas and other sandy or gravelly soils. Creosote bush grows throughout the Southwest and northern Mexico.
Although widespread, it is not widely appreciated. Many consider the miles of creosote shrubland boring; others think it worthless, since cattle refuse to eat its resinous foliage; still others object to the fragrance produced when its coating of fifty or more volatile oils is washed off into the air by a desert rain. (In Mexico, its name is hediondilla—little stinker.) Regardless, creosote bush is an integral part of the desert, and a sophisticated example of the strategies plants use to adapt to the harsh environment.
Creosote bush's distinctive odor and the leaves' shiny appearance are due to a resinous, varnish-like coating which helps the plant keep from drying out. The sophisticated coating also screens the sun's h
Tasting terrible and smelling funny helps creosote bush survive in the most difficult desert environments, from parts of Baja California where four years may pass without significant rainfall, to the floor of Death Valley, where temperatures sometimes fluctuate 70 degrees from day to night. Not only does it survive, it thrives: the oldest living plant is a 9,000-year-old creosote bush in the Mojave desert of southern California.
Creosote bush's complex chemical armor contains a veritable medicine chest: Native desert-dwellers drink teas steeped from the fragrant branches and inhale the pungent smoke to treat complaints from colds to fungal infections to rheumatism. Not surprisingly, researchers have found that the resins contain painkillers, fungicides, anti-inflammatories, and a powerful antioxidant which may be useful in treating alcoholism, liver diseases and cancer.
Whenever I breathe creosote-perfumed air after a rain, I remember this creation story told by the Pima and Papago Indians:
When Earthmaker took the first soil from his breast, they say, creosote bush was the first thing to sprout.
From the unpretentious creosote, Earthmaker created the world.