The Winter Garden

I've been meaning to get to the Winter Garden for most of the week, but I keep getting distracted.  Here's the photo I took last Monday of Poppy Hill at the Botanic Garden's Heritage Farm.  Rather desolate and univiting.

But hidden in the dun landscape, life lives on.  It's early February, yet here are rosettes of Penstemon neomexicana.  An endangered species endemic to the Sacramento Mountains, the ex sito population here can provide insurance in case a calamitous wildfire strikes their native range.  Additionally, it affords a wonderful (and lovely) teaching moment during garden tours.  

Nestled in amoung the Penstemon are the much taller dried stalks of prickly poppy, Argemone pinnatasecta.  These rare poppies survive only in a handful of drainages in the Sacramento Mountains above Alamogordo.  The closely related A. pleiacantha is much more common throughout New Mexico.  Fortunately, none is found within 5 miles of the Heritage Farm, so the gene pool of this rare and endangered poppy is protected.

By mid-Summer these will be bursting with large white blossoms that catch the eye.  Indeed, we harvested them as specimen #1 when Sheila Conneen and I began pressing samples for the little herbarium in the Education Building.