Collection 2: "Called Out" by Barbara Kingsolver

Our mountains wore mantles of yellow brittlebush on their rocky shoulders, as fully transformed as eastern forests in their colorful autumn foliage.

Abandoned cotton fields—flat, salinized ground long since left for dead—rose again, wearing brocade.

For weeks, each day’s walk to the mailbox became a botanical treasure hunt, as our attention caught first on new colors, then on whole new species in this terrain we thought we had already cataloged.

Our friends from other climes couldn’t quite make out what the fuss was about.

Many people aren’t aware that the desert blooms at all, even in a normal year, and few would guess how much effort we devote to waiting and prognosticating.

We glanced at each other nervously: A picturesque response indeed, from scientifically trained types like ourselves.

Yet it seemed more compelling than any pedestrian lecture on life cycles and latency periods.

Yet it seemed more compelling than any pedestrian lecture on life cycles and latency periods.

And how was it that, at the behest of some higher power than the calendar, all at once there came a crowd?

It’s the female rains that affect spring flowering, and in some years, such as 1998, the benefaction trails steadily from winter on into spring.

Challenging conditions for an ephemeral, these are.

In any given year, a subset of a species’s seeds don’t germinate, because they’re
programmed for a longer dormancy.

In any given year, a subset of a species’s seeds don’t germinate, because they’re
programmed for a longer dormancy.

Some species even vary seed size: Larger seeds make more resilient sprouts, and smaller ones are less costly to produce; either morph may be programmed for delayed germination, depending on the particular strategy of the species.

That is our misapprehension, along with our notion of this floral magic show—now you see it, now you don’t—as a thing we can predict and possess like a garden.