The Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona has a huge collection of desert plants. It is a lovely place to visit especially in the cooler parts of the year. Over the past few years, the garden has been improved and beautified. One addition that I noted was that there are now several boojum trees growing in different parts of the garden. Here is a short explanation of these plants.
Fouquieria columnaris, the Boojum tree or cirio (American Spanish: [ˈsiɾjo]) is a tree in the ocotillo family,(Fouquieriaceae) whose other members include the ocotillos. Some taxonomists place it in the separate genus Idria. It is nearly endemic to the Baja California Peninsula (both the northern and southern states), with only a small population in the Sierra Bacha of Sonora, Mexico. The plant's English name, Boojum, was given by Godfrey Sykes of the Desert Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona and is taken from Lewis Carroll's poem "The Hunting of the Snark".
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