The trees of summer: Smoke trees, cacti and palms have long been revered by desert locals

Palm tree in the desert. (Photo: Palm Springs Historical Society/Special to The Desert Sun)

Tracy Conrad
Special to The Desert Sun

Signaling the end of spring, smoke trees in the desert washes become dotted with tiny bluish-purple blooms at the beginning of summer each year.

The color is deep and distinct and has been revered by desert dwellers for decades. Nellie Coffman herself was known to berate anyone who dared chop down a smoke tree.

Most visitors to the desert had no appreciation for the tree having never seen it in bloom. Visitors evaporated from Palm Springs in May as temperatures increased threatening the coming summer.

But local residents, like Coffman, knew better. Agnes Pelton famously painted “Smoke Tree in Bloom” to be auctioned off to benefit the newly formed Desert Art Center.

Carl Bray, fancied for himself the sobriquet “painter of smoke trees” as they featured regularly on his canvases. Other desert artists like John Hilton, William Darling and Jimmy Swinnerton were captivated by the indigo blooms, buzzing with bees, and memorialized their brief early summer show in paint.

Spring in the desert is spectacular, but summer is even more impressive for the cacti, trees and scrubs that survive it.

Wise and observant desert dwellers had special reverence for the plant species found in this harsh environment.

The village of Palm Springs took its name from the indigenous palms, found in the ravines of the surrounding mountains. The native California fan palm signaled the presence of water to early settlers and Native Americans. The Cahuilla used the fruit of the Washingtonia filifera for food and its fronds for weaving and roofing.

The importation of date palms to the area a century ago started the comparison of the Coachella Valley to the deserts of the Middle East and sparked an agricultural industry. Soon there was cultivation of all sorts of palm species as ornamental trees.

Grand allees of palms would soon line the boulevards of Los Angeles and San Diego. In Palm Springs, Ruth Hardy, owner of the Ingleside Inn and the first councilwoman, campaigned for planting palms along both sides of highway 111, engendering its name of Palm Canyon Drive.

Soldiering trees marched all the way to the Indian Canyons where the native palms could be found in abundance; the basis for the village itself.

The original summer survivor in the desert is, of course, the cactus. Reverence for its diversity was elevated to an art form by Chester “Cactus Slim” and Patricia Moorten. The Moortens famously saved cacti in the path of road construction for use as ornamentals in gardens.

They collected unusual specimens from all over the desert southwest and Baja Mexico, bringing them home to Palm Springs and transplanting them into the garden plot around their new home (purchased from photographer and painter Stephen Willard who was leaving town because it had gotten too crowded.)

A botanist trained at University of Southern California, Patricia published her classic book, “Desert Plants for Desert Gardens” much before the idea of using native plants in a sustainable way became the norm. The magazine Popular Mechanics even featured an article on the Moortens in March of 1960.

The Moortens’ appreciation of cacti was akin to Nellie’s reverence of smoke trees. Locals survived through the tough summers to be rewarded with mild winters and glorious springs, just like native trees, scrubs and cacti.

Locals tried to cultivate an appreciation of the subtleties of desert plants by memorializing the spectacular blooms in postcards and pictures. And they tried to inculcate that appreciation through guidebooks for newcomers.

Melba Bennett, the founder of many Palm Springs institutions including the “Palm Springs Hat,” the Palm Springs Historical Society and the Palm Springs Garden Club, wrote a little book just for this purpose. Meant to help new arrivals cultivate a proper desert garden, her little book had practical advice and was annotated in the margins with little whimsical doodles to emphasize her points. The book contains charming descriptions and recommendations gleaned from years of hard work and experimentation in her garden at Deep Well Ranch.

Plants were chosen for their riot of blooms in springtime and their ability to survive the blistering heat of summer.

The diminutive indigo blooms of smoke trees were complemented by the exuberant deep orange bouquets offered by Poinciana, Mexican bird of paradise.

Bennett counseled a variety of colors and shapes in the composition of a garden, and a rotation of flowering to provide interest in the garden through the coming long summer months.

Smoke trees in full indigo bloom are a desert paradox

Smoke trees.

Words by Ruth Nolan
Photographs by Millicent Harvey
Desert Sun Magazine

When it comes to iconic desert trees, Palm Springs is famous for its palm-filled canyons, while the Mojave Desert is home to the ubiquitous Joshua tree. The sultry smoke tree also fills our washes and age-old flood plains, holding its rightful place as one of the most iconic shrub-like trees of the Coachella Valley and vast tracts of the California and Arizona deserts.

The low-voiced, puff-shaped smoke tree (Psorothamnus spinosus) enchants through different seasons – a winter-long, half-dead appearance of tangled brown branches and scant white-green, tiny leaves, and then this: a short, late spring season of vivid, dark blue-violet colored flowers bursting from its seeming passivity that startle the desert sky and passersby with an unmistakable presence and unanticipated beauty.

Smoke trees in full indigo bloom are a desert paradox. Viewed from a canyon overlook down into a desolate, bone-dry desert wash, the purple hues burst from the trees below, making them sag with top-heavy abundance and the weight of their odd, proliferate beauty. The clusters of vivid color, illuminated by the desert’s fabled light and contrasted with stark, brown canyon walls and barren sand, resemble a bigger version of dark purple Fantasy grapes, grown and harvested in many eastern valley vineyards. They offer a sense of visual abundance and reassurance that this is, after all, a desert of life – as well as promises of ephemeral and lasting, if briefly witnessed, magnificence.

Walk up close to one of these powerfully blooming trees, and you’ll see that the indigo flowers are, individually, quite small, and resemble flowers on a pea plant, to which smoke trees are, incidentally, related. The desert at your feet will be covered with a sweet purple carpet of fallen and quickly drying blooms. This past May, as desert temperatures began to climb into triple digits and most of the seasonal visitors had already departed, smoke trees filled Coachella Valley washes with brilliant indigo hues for a few short weeks before fading back into hushed tones.

These vibrant colors are among the fleeting beauty of all desert flowers, and offer deeply satisfying and inspirational views that keep many of us here, year after year, through unbearably long summers of staggering and dangerous heat, and prolonged months without rain. Smoke trees, in all their full-bloomed glory, offer a long drink of cool beauty to all thirsty souls in the desert who have waited so long to sip.

A wise teacher

Smoke trees don’t announce themselves with the sort of loud, outward pronouncements made by palms or Joshua trees. Instead, they weave their way into one’s consciousness, waiting patiently for the intrepid sort of desert rat or visitor who has time to notice, and maybe explore, the magic held within the smoke.

Inside the rugged, forested feel of a single tree or, more likely, a cluster of trees – spaced, like most desert plants, a respectful distance apart and running predictably up and down the wash or flood plain that nourishes its lifespan and offspring – you’ll see desert light filtering in. It gently touches the brown, seemingly lifeless lower branches and illuminates the iridescent, wintergreen-toned upper branches, bringing the purple flowers to brilliant life as if in a cloud.

Each baby tree, brought to life from the odd but vital process of scarification, in which its seed is scratched from the violent movement of sand and rocks during flash floods, sinks a tap root deep into the earth until it finds water. In this sense, the smoke tree is also a wise desert teacher and flood zone signifier: Seasoned campers know not to set up camp wherever there are smoke trees, although for the vast majority of time, water is not to be seen or found in what appears to be an extremely arid land.

The time of flowering for smoke trees is brief, only a few weeks from mid-May through early June, and like many desert plants, their yearly time of blooming can be either abundant or sparse, depending on rainfall, soil temperatures and other factors. This past bloom in spring was one of the most fantastic in recent memory.

Symbol of silence

For most of the year, smoke trees quietly and instinctively scale back their presence, in a process known as “die-back,” common to many other desert plants. While waiting patiently in the rain shadow looming above our canyons and washes, smoke trees take on the brittle appearance of being almost dead, or dying. In fact, the process of dropping most of its tiny light green leaves, except in the top branches of the trees, is what helps the smoke tree survive and even thrive.

The appearance of the smoke tree in winter and other dry months is what has evoked its iconic name: These are times when it appears most like wisps of smoke wafting across canyon floors and washes. But to those who listen, and look, and wait patiently, the very desert-defining presence of the smoke tree comes vividly alive.

The collective voice of these near-invisible trees was certainly heard by the many plein-air, impressionistic desert artists of the earlier to mid-20th century. Dubbed the Smoke Tree School, painters such as Carl Eytel, John Hilton and Carl Bray – whose home and gallery are commemorated along Highway 111 in Indian Wells – brought the smoke tree, in both its more ghostly, silent and wildly blossoming violet-hued incarnations to life, and memorialized the timeless feel of the untouched desert in paintings that emblemize its ubiquitous presence.

The song of this year’s splashy, violet-blue smoke tree super bloom may have faded away, but its melodic imprint remains. Like all desert plant life, its time of flowering is brief, and perhaps memorialized all the more because of its brevity.

The smoke tree remains, at all times of year, a symbol of the silence and adaptability to times of overabundance and drought that are endemic to desert living – and a talisman of renewal, transformation and hope. It represents many qualities that so many of us come here for: a rare, tranquil stillness and the graceful surrender to the splendor of the desert’s wide open and seemingly endless girth, one tempered only by mountains, canyon walls and precious dearth.

Explore More

SMOKE TREES CAN BE FOUND IN ABUNDANCE LOCALLY IN ARABY WASH IN PALM SPRINGS; ALONG HAYSTACK ROAD'S EASTERN SIDEWALK IN PALM DESERT; AT THE LIVING DESERT ZOO AND GARDENS; IN THOUSAND PALMS OASIS PRESERVE AND ALONG MCCALLUM TRAIL IN COACHELLA VALLEY PRESERVE; AND ALONG BOX CANYON ROAD IN THE MECCA HILLS.