This post announces the launch of a website I set up, Wildflowers of Joshua Tree Country, a botanical guide for common plants of the Mojave Desert, showcasing my own photography. Feel free to just go look at it now without reading the rest of this if you want! (But hit the thumbs-up before you go.)
The desert is much misunderstood in western culture. Because we are an agriculturally-based civilization, we judge land on how appropriate it is for farming, and in that context, the desert is considered “useless” and by extension, “lifeless.”
This perspective has a long history. An “eremologist” is one who studies deserts, and the word is derived from the Greek eremos — ἐρημία — which means both “desert” and “lonely.” As detailed by photographer and amateur botanist, Michael L. Charters, at his website, “California Plant Names: Latin and Greek Meanings and Derivations,” forms of eremos signify:
“a lonely place, a place of solitude, a deserted place, solitary, uninhabited” and by extension “of the desert” since a desert is a lonely place that is largely uninhabited.
Uninhabited by agriculturally-civilized humans, that is. But not uninhabited.
