No snakes or brooms, but broom snakeweed

In Petroglyph National Monument in northwest Albuquerque on September 23rd I saw plenty of broom snakeweed plants, Gutierrezia sarothrae, flowering away. This one in the Piedras Marcadas section of the national monument appealed to me because of its contrast with the darker boulders it was growing among. Notice the sand sagebrush about a quarter of the way down the left edge of the picture (in fact if you follow the link to that post from a few weeks ago, you’ll see there was a broom snakeweed plant flowering behind the more conspicuous sand sagebrush).

Although broom snakeweed is listed for the county I live in in central Texas, it’s not common there, so I was happy to find it flowering in large numbers 700 miles northwest of home. If you’d like to see the distribution by states and counties, the USDA map will show it to you.

© 2014 Steven Schwartzman