Cholla Cactus Garden
— — light caught in a field of spines.
Not only on a wall.
“A quarter-mile loop through a dense stand of teddybear cholla in the Pinto Basin, where the Mojave Desert hands off to the Colorado. The cactus looks soft from a distance, gold and silver in the right light, but every walker on the trail learns the same lesson about its spines, which detach at a touch. The garden is best the half-hour before sunset, when the low sun comes through from behind and the whole grove turns translucent. The wind picks up around then. The air smells of creosote.
Cholla Cactus Garden, 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.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Cholla Cactus Garden sits in the Pinto Basin of Joshua Tree National Park, in the transition zone where the higher, cooler Mojave Desert meets the lower, hotter Colorado Desert. The basin floor here is about 2,000 feet above sea level. A quarter-mile loop trail runs through a roughly ten-acre stand of teddybear cholla, Cylindropuntia bigelovii. Joshua Tree was set aside as a national monument by Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 and redesignated a national park by Congress in 1994. The garden is about twenty miles south of the Oasis Visitor Center in Twentynine Palms, on Pinto Basin Road.
The garden is defined less by colour than by light. Teddybear cholla, sometimes called jumping cholla because its joints detach at the slightest contact, is densely covered in straw-coloured spines that act like tiny optical fibres. In the half-hour after sunrise and the half-hour before sunset, the low sun strikes the grove from behind and the spines glow, plant by plant, gold against the dark basin. The effect ends as quickly as it begins. The garden then returns to its daylight palette of olive green, ochre, and rust.
The Cholla Cactus Garden trailhead is on Pinto Basin Road, about twenty miles south of the Oasis Visitor Center at the Twentynine Palms park entrance and about thirty miles north of Cottonwood Visitor Center near Interstate 10. The loop is roughly a quarter-mile, mostly flat, on a sand-and-gravel path with interpretive signs. The cholla spines barb at the tip and detach in clusters, so visitors are asked to stay on the trail and keep dogs out. The standard park entrance fee covers the stop. The garden is open every hour the park is, which is most of the year.