| brittlebrush and globemallow are beautiful native plants. Same with the "weed" version of Arizona sunflowers. The 'weed' version of dandylion is pretty gross, but even that I'll sometimes just replant to the desert near me. But these little yellow ball things are pretty obnoxious. They're easy to identify and pull early though. They're pretty so people are defending them, but I'd rather have native flowers for the native butterflies, bees and humming birds. Of the approximately 5,000 different species of bees in the United States, around 1,300 live in Arizona, meaning Arizona contains the most diversity of bees in the country, and perhaps the world. People in these comments think sahara when they think desert. Truth is Arizona is more diverse than most states with their same 5 trees everyone else has and their stupid grass everyone else has. As for this plant doing anything good, I appreciate your optimism, but I don't think it lives through the summer so it's just a wham bam spread then catch on fire disaster. If we had more rain maybe it would be not so bad. But when it dries out so much and then this is laying around waiting to burn, it's bad news. It seems that you couldn't do a better job burning the desert down if you wanted to. This literally puts tinder all over the place. You can't rival that even with blowtorches and napalm. You could firebomb the desert and in the absence of this stuff, those fires would burn out in between sections of growth. But with this stuff, one cigarette or lightning strike can take out hundreds of acres. |