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Uses of Native Desert Plants: Yesterday & Today
They’re growing all around you…hardy and helpful wild desert plants that can add richness to your kitchen, your medicine chest, your home, and your garden, as well as enhancing the lives of your neighborhood wildlife.

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Cooper's Goldenbush_8316

Why Plant Native?

We have been trained, over generations of time, that whenever we move into an area, we are to remove the native plants growing on our new site and replace them with plants from wherever we were before, or at least with plants we are familiar with. The plants we introduce into our new setting are not necessarily the ones best adapted to that area, but are the ones that have been marketed to us as the industrial standards that are [...]

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Notes from Songbird Cottage

Home Building in Birdland

Suddenly, all the wayward string, sticks, fibers, feathers, paper, and cushion stuffing have become hot commodities around our yard. Now that nest-building season has arrived, what was earlier considered debris has become treasure to the birds living throughout Songbird Cottage’s yard. The path-side, spiny trimmings from our wild plums (Ziziphus parryi, also known as Parry Abrojo) that we had temporarily set beside the pathway have now been picked over by a pair of industrious verdins, and incorporated into their nest – [...]

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Robin Kobaly

Welcome!

Robin Kobaly with The Power of Plants is your source for information about uses of native plants of the southwestern United States, and water-wise landscaping using native and drought-tolerant plants.

You’ll find useful tips here, as well as information on where you can take classes or obtain books and DVD’s on using native and water-wise plants in your daily life. Your guide, Robin Kobaly, is a professional botanist with thirty years of experience whose passion about plants has guided her entire life. We’re glad you’ve joined us here to explore the fascinating world of plants.

Meet Robin
About the Power of Plants
Water-Wise Landscaping: The DVD

Where can I see wildflowers?

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Paperbag-bush_web_0422

The rains over the fall and winter months are what entice many wildflowers out for a spring showing. We have had very little rain in southern California since last fall, and it is the fall rains that produce our best wildflower shows. While the lack of rain may not cause massive explosions of wildflowers, there may be some nice spring displays of both annual wildflowers and perennial shrubs in localized areas across the southwest deserts of southern California where scattered storms did deliver some needed moisture. You may track wildflower conditions throughout the Southwest desert on Desert USA’s website.

Five parks in Southern California regularly update wildflower reports on their websites during the viewing season:

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