Encelia farinosa

One plant that should be included in any dry land garden is Encelia farinosa, or brittle bush. This plant was well known by the early inhabitants of the region. The sticky sap was used as glue or melted and used as varnish. It can be chewed as gum. The plant was made into a tea and served a variety of medicinal uses. It was also burned as "incienso" by the early Friars.

Our lot included many varieties of local native plants. ( one reason we chose it...) One plant was conspicuously missing, however. Not one brittle bush was present on our lot and we searched many nurseries before we located one that even grew the common plant. Now, many nurseries stock these showy well adapted arid plants. We bought five of the one gallon size and, before long, they naturalized and spread throughout the entire lot. We have given many starts to friends and actually have to weed them out of the gravel driveway, where they spring up after each rain.

They require little water, grow quickly, look good during any season and blossom into a mass of yellow each spring. They fill the garden with color, attract birds, are eaten by rabbits as a last resort and are a perfect fill-in plant. The pastel gray-green foliage blends with other desert plants perfectly and they require a minimum of effort to grow. They will survive on as little as five annual inches of rain. None of our brittle bush are irrigated. During drought, they will just shed a few leaves, maintain their branches , wait for rain...then leaf out!

After they have bloomed, we let the flower heads dry on the bush. Birds love the seeds, In the late summer or early fall, we prune off the stiff brittle flower stalks to create a more attractive compact plant.