Ten to twenty foot tall ocotillo is tipped with stunning scarlet blossoms that send fire into the desert sky. "Ocotillo" translates as "desert torch", named for the myriad flaming petals tossed upward on spindly stalks. Anyone who encounters these stately desert plants, with their thorny, dessicated stems waving in the sky falls a bit under their spell. But if you find one blooming, there's no resisting the magical pull. This one frames solitary San Jacinto Peak in the remote borderlands above the Rio Grande. I fell for it immediately.
Part of the mystique of the ocotillo is that it looks leafless and quite dead most of the time. It hunkers down, then depends on stored chlorophyll to survive. Stems wildly shoot upward from a compact, tin-can-like base, then only rarely branch. Rain sends tiny beads of green leaves shooting out up and down those stalks, but green lasts only as long as moisture remains, and the red flowers are usually first to color the plant "alive".
This cycle of leafing out, then drying and dropping can happen half a dozen times a year as the ocotillo adapts to good times and bad. Then good times come again and flaming red flowers set the sky on fire. There's a life lesson in there.
No wonder we who love the desert love these plants.

Personal insights into this landscape:
This is my second take on this remarkable view, one I photographed a couple of decades ago, then painted in oils on a small, rough canvas. That first painting, "Ocotillo at San Jacinto Peak" was unpolished, a simple oil sketch, yet it remains one of my all time best sellers as a small print. Yet I've seen it so many times, I began wishing I'd developed it further, refined the foreground, played more with color in the stems and flowers. I wished I'd let grass move, and clouds form. I wished I'd painted it on a larger canvas, with space to tell more of the ocotillo's lovely story, with more space for the plant to dance with the sky.
So, one day, I did. Keeping the same intriguing composition where the plant frames the peak, I threw out everything else, including my reference photo. To tell this story of magic, of rebirth and resilience, I relied on my heart, and on a lifetime of admiration for ocotillo. I'd like to think I'm a more accomplished painter than I was when I painted my first take on this, but I know I'm better at distilling the story from my subjects and spinning it into magic!