Ocotillo in red flame
— — the desert's quick fire, lit each spring.
Not only on a wall.
“A plant that looks dead for most of the year, then spends six weeks on fire. After winter rain, the ocotillo throws small green leaves up its grey canes and tips each one with a clutch of scarlet flowers. Hummingbirds work the blooms; carpenter bees take the rest. By summer the leaves drop, the red is gone, and the canes go back to looking like driftwood. — from the studio
Ocotillo in red flame, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Ocotillo, Fouquieria splendens, is a desert shrub native to the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts of the American Southwest and northern Mexico. In Arizona it grows on rocky slopes from the Mexican border up to about 5,000 feet, common across Saguaro National Park, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and the foothills around Tucson and Phoenix. Mature plants reach ten to twenty feet, sending up eight to thirty whip-like canes from a single woody base. It is not a true cactus; its closest relatives sit in the Fouquieriaceae family, which is endemic to the deserts of North America.
The red is delivered in a tight cluster of tubular flowers at the very tip of each cane, two to four inches long, scarlet edging into crimson. Bloom runs from March through June across most of Arizona, often triggered by a soaking winter rain. Anna's and broad-tailed hummingbirds time their northbound migration to the bloom; the long red tubes are the classic hummingbird-pollinated shape. Carpenter bees rob nectar through small slits cut in the side of the flowers, taking the sugar without doing the pollination work.
The leafing is the second show. Within forty-eight hours of a rain, small bright green leaves push out along the entire length of every cane. They photosynthesise hard for a few weeks, drop when the soil dries, and the plant goes dormant again. A single ocotillo can leaf out and drop five or six times in a single year, depending on the rains. Lifespan is long; mature specimens are estimated at sixty to one hundred years, with some likely older. The plant is protected under Arizona's Native Plant Law.