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Creosote Bush — fragrance of the desert

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My family and I moved to Las Cruces in summer, arriving on the heels of a late-evening thunderstorm. Darkness hid the landscape by the time we drove round the bend on I-25 north of town, but our noses told us where we were. The cool night air pouring in the car windows bore a rich and complicated mix of odors: citrus, sweet nectar, vinyl, camphor – emanating from creosote bush, the fragrance of our new home in the Chihuahuan desert.

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 harsh rays, sheltering the delicate inner cells from heat and ultraviolet light. And it discourages grazers – the mix of waxes, volatile oils and other compounds tastes terrible and is indigestible to most animals. Only one small grasshopper, which spends its entire life on creosote, happily munches the resinous leaves.

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.

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