Fouquieria splendens

Not a cactus. Not related to cacti at all — it's in its own small family, and the resemblance is coincidence.

The canes look dead most of the year, and that's the strategy. Ocotillo is drought-deciduous: within days of a real rain it pushes out small oval leaves along the entire length of every cane, holds them while the soil is damp, then drops them when it dries out. It can run that cycle five or six times in a single year, leafing out and going bare again with the weather.

Every leaf is a bet. Making them costs water, so the plant only commits when the rain is already in the ground.

The flowers are a separate calculation. Dense clusters of red tubular blooms appear at the cane tips in spring, timed to the northbound hummingbird migration — which is the point of the tube shape and the color. Carpenter bees and orioles work them too.

A cut cane will root if you set it upright in the ground, which is why ocotillo fences show up around old properties across southern Arizona. Some of those fences are still alive decades later, leafing out after every storm.