Arizona saguaros in trouble
The New York Times (Wednesday, August 4, 2021) reports that Arizona’s iconic saguaros (Carnegiea gigantea), pronounced (suh-wahr-ohs) are in trouble thanks to the invasive buffelgrass (Cenchrus ciliaris). This is why I still subscribe to newspapers: once in a while there is an interesting story. Now, at first it looked like another wild fire report related to global warming. But, actually, the iconic saguaros are facing multiple threats.
Vas meets saguaros
I first met the iconic cactus in a Las Vegas neighborhood in 2019. It was in February and my son’s travel soccer academy team was in town to play a tournament. So, I went for a walk around my hotel in the morning, carefully taking pictures; I could not really remember if Nevada was an open carry state. Months later I would be kicked out of a church parking lot in Lake Forest, California, just outside Los Angeles, for taking pictures.
During my walk I came to a cool, if somewhat rundown, residential landscape.
I love this! You can’t get much lower maintenance than this. There is some lava rock with grassy weeds and two saguaros. (Until today I pronounced the name with a strong “g” but it’s suh-wahr-ohs. Now you know). In the wild, they can grow up to 60 feet and live for 200 years, reports the New York Times story.
Other than weeding, there isn’t much to do here. No water is wasted on a patch of lawn but I would add some other succulent plants.
African import
Buffelgrass was imported into the United States in the 1930s. It’s a drought-tolerant savanna grass which likes fire. And that’s a problem, especially for the saguaros. Now, normally there are gaps between desert plants. You might see one saguaro and mesquite, ironwood and palo verde plants. Incidentally, the palo verde tree canopies protect young saguaros.
The problem with buffelgrass is that it’s highly flammable and it spreads in open spaces with great success. As it does so, it displaces native plants and loads up the desert with flammable materials. Then all you need is one lightning strike and poof, everything burns, including the iconic master of desert survival.
This is what happened recently and now the fight is on to limit the spread of buffelgrass.
The fight
The best way to get rid of buffelgrass is to dig up the clumpy grass, removing the full clump to limit re-sprouting. But that’s a big job now that the grass is widely spreading in southern Arizona. The locals in Arizona organize eradication parties; the way people in my neighborhood organize to pull invasive ivy out of our woods.
When the grass is at least 50% green, you can spray it with glyphosate but I find this very desperate. I hate herbicides.
Prescribed burns work in open desert sections
The enemy
Before you start pulling grasses out of the desert, learn to identify the enemy. Fortunately, buffelgrass is easy to identify. The flower spike has a bottle brush look and, if you remove the flowers, the remaining rachis (flower stalk) is rough to the touch. Also, where the leaf attaches to the stem, the leaf has distinct hairs. One worker in a video compared it to a hairy armpit.
To protect the saguaros and other natives of the Sonoran desert, Arizona must fight the invasive buffelgrass. I would love to go out and pull some out of the desert but, alas, I live too far away, in the Pacific Northwest. It would make for a great blog post.
It’s interesting to note how this grass all of a sudden sticks out as the enemy with drought conditions most likely driven by global warming. The saguaros should be fine if we can limit the flammable grass in the Sonoran desert. They will not be fine if the desert burns every year.
