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Fouquieria columnaris
Also called Boojumtree
The Boojum tree is a tall, tapering, columnar desert tree from Baja California and nearby Sonora, Mexico, and is grown as a curiosity in dry climates. Its key to success is a very dry, well-drained site with sharp drainage and minimal water.
Fouquieria columnaris, the Boojum tree or cirio (Latin American Spanish: [ˈsiɾjo]) is a tree in the ocotillo family, whose other members include the ocotillos. Some taxonomists place it in the separate genus Idria. It is nearly endemic to the Baja California Peninsula (both the northern and southern states), with only a small population in the Sierra Bacha of Sonora, Mexico. The plant's English name, Boojum, was given by Godfrey Sykes of the Desert Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona, and is taken from Lewis Carroll's poem "The Hunting of the Snark".
This species occurs from sea level to up to 1450 meters in elevation on deep to shallow volcanic loams or clays to decomposed granite soils, on well-drained sites on hillsides, mesa, and alluvial plains. It is found from the vicinity of San Quintín in Baja California south to the Tres Vírgenes complex of volcanoes in Baja California Sur; a notable concentration is the Boojum Forest. It is also found on Isla Angel de la Guarda in the Gulf of California. On mainland Mexico, it is also found in a small area south of Puerto Libertad in coastal Sonora. The annual rainfall within its region only averages about 73 to 140 mm, mainly from January to April and in lesser amounts in August through September. Rainfall is unreliable and sometimes years may pass without heavy rainfall.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Fouquieria columnaris by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
