Our Fouquieria awaits new garden designation

This is Fouquieria diguetii, which you can call Ocotillo or Palo Adon (Adam's Tree).

It's growing in the Elisabeth Murdoch Californian Garden, near the new Arid Garden in Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne. Outside botanic gardens and specialist collections, it grows mostly in the Sonoran desert of Baja California, Mexico. So sort of Californian...

The scientific name sounds very French because the genus was named after Pierre Éloi Fouquier, a King's physician in the early nineteenth century, and the species, after Léon Diguet, a French naturalist who explored and collected widely in Mexico.

Diguet's collections were examined by Phillippe van Tieghem, who included the species a genus Bronnia which is now part of Fouquieria: a difficult name to pronounce with any authenticity or without sounding rather affected.

As Wikipedia puts it, "while semi-succulent and a desert plant, Ocotillo is more closely related to tea and blueberries than to cactuses". This quote comes from the entry on Fouquieria splendens, to which they allocate the common name Octotillo, but the statement applies to the whole genus. 

And why?  Well because Fouquieriaceae, a family of one genus (Fourquieria) is grouped together these days with the tea and heath families, in the order Ericales. 

There are 11 species of Fougquieria and a few seem to be called Ocotillo. Fouquieria splendens, which more commonly attracts this name, has a few more stamens (the yellow dusty male parts) on each flower and a thicker, more distinct trunk. Those flowers are red in both species and shaped in a way that supports pollination by hummingbirds.

The trunk has attractive peeling bark and, like a few desert plants, partly green to allow it to photosynthesise (allowing it to have less leaf cover).

The thorns are typical of many desert plants, like the cacti to which is is unrelated, and act to protect the plant from animals that might snack on those very few, precious leaves.

All up its an intriguing plant with an odd lineage. Not the most beautiful garden specimen but it fits, more or less, into our Californian themed garden. A garden soon to be expanded in name and scope to a North American Arid and Drylands Collection. Phew.

Postscript added 19 June 2022: I had forgotten at the time I wrote this post that I'd seen this species in one of its natural habitats, Joshua National Park near to Los Angeles. That was back in September 2014, and the plant I photographed wasn't in flower. Still it had an impressive setting...