Plates from the desert floor.
Botanical illustration of Sonoran Desert species and the pollinators that depend on them. Printed to order in Arizona.
View the seriesThe Series
Ordered by plate number, as issued.
Saguaros bloom at night.
The flowers open after dark and close by mid-morning. That timing isn't incidental — it's built for a specific pollinator.
The lesser long-nosed bat migrates north from central Mexico each spring, arriving as the first saguaro flowers open, and follows the bloom up through the Sonoran Desert. It hovers, plunges face-first into the flower, and moves on carrying pollen.
Most people who live here have never seen the animal that makes the saguaro possible.
I'm the fourth generation of my family born in Arizona.
My great-grandmother walked in the statehood parade in 1912. My grandmother was born in Miami — the copper town up Highway 60, past the Superstitions — the daughter of a miner. My father was born there too. I was born in Tucson, and I've lived in the shadow of the Superstitions most of my life.
Bajada — bah-HAH-dah. The broad apron of sediment at the base of a desert mountain range, built by water coming off the slope over thousands of years. It's where the soil runs deepest and where the saguaros stand thickest. Drive east out of Phoenix and watch the ground rise toward the Superstitions, and you're looking at one. It's also the road to Miami, which is probably why I picked the word.
You learn a few things growing up here. That the saguaro on the ridge started its life under a palo verde that's long dead now. That its flowers open after dark, for bats. That the ocotillo isn't dead in June — it's just finished with leaves for a while. That the place runs on a schedule most people never notice, because they're seeing it from a car in July.
Bajada Press makes plates of that country. Not landscapes — species. One at a time, drawn the way natural history was recorded before photography: single-color line work, the binomial and the family, a plate number. The kind of illustration that makes you look at a plant properly.
Every plate is printed when you order it. Nothing is warehoused and nothing gets liquidated. The tradeoff is a few extra days in shipping, which seems like the right one.
Nine plates so far. There's a lot of desert left.