The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Pholisma sonorae
Sandfood is a rare, leafless, parasitic desert perennial that lives underground in sand dunes, attached to the roots of host shrubs and emerging only as a small rounded stem tip. It needs sandy desert conditions and a host plant, which makes it very hard to grow in cultivation.
Pholisma sonorae, commonly known as sandfood, is a rare and unusual species of flowering plant endemic to the Sonoran Deserts to the west of Yuma, Arizona in the California Yuha, Mojave Desert and Colorado Desert, and south in the Yuma Desert, where it is known from only a few locations.
This was an important food item for certain desert-dwelling Native American peoples, including the Cocopah and the Hia C-eḍ O'odham.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Pholisma sonorae 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.
