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Arrowweed
Pluchea sericea (Nutt.) CovilleSunflower family (Asteraceae)
Arrowweed is a tall, willowlike desert shrub with many slender, upright stems. Its narrow, silvery-green leaves and clusters of small lavender to purplish flowers make it recognizable along washes, springs, marshy ground, and the edges of playas.
It grows where moisture is available near the surface, especially in desert riparian areas. Arrowweed also tolerates alkaline and saline soils, allowing it to grow in low flats, seeps, and around dry lakes where many other shrubs cannot survive.
The long, straight stems gave arrowweed its common name. Indigenous people of the Mojave and neighboring deserts used selected stems for arrow shafts. Unstripped stems were also woven into granaries, brush shelters, walls, and other practical structures. In palm oases and wet desert thickets, arrowweed may form a dense subcanopy beneath cottonwoods, willows, mesquite, or fan palms.
Arrowweed is an important part of the Mojave's water-edge vegetation. Its thickets provide cover for birds and small animals, help hold soil along wet ground, and often mark places where underground water lies close to the surface.
Also see: Desert Riparian Habitats; Oasis of Mara; Mojave Material Culture; Mojave Trade and Storage; Southern Paiute Homes; Devil's Cornfield; Stovepipe Wells Dune Field
Title: Arrowweed - Pluchea sericea - Mojave Desert Plant
Description: Arrowweed, Pluchea sericea, is a tall desert shrub of riparian areas, springs, alkaline flats, and playas. Its straight stems were used for arrows, granaries, and shelters. desert riparian habitats, and in some low, flat areas, including those that are quite saline.
Also see:
Desert Riparian - Desert Habitats
The subcanopy includes smaller individuals of the canopy species as well as quailbush, Mojave seablight, desert lavender, seep willow, and arrowweed.
Timbisha Shoshone
Traditional brush homes made perfect desert dwellings, allowing breezes to filter in through the arrowweed walls. Men hunted jacjrabbits and bighorn sheep, ...
Oasis of Mara
Common Plants of the Oasis > Arrowweed (Pluchea sericea), seen here in the dense thickets, bears beautiful lavender flowers in the late spring. The Serrano ...
Mojave - Material Culture, Technology, Structures
Mojave houses were large and usually rectangular, and covered with a thatch of arrowweed and then sand, but it is doubtful that this kind of structure was built ...
Fan Palm Oasis - Desert Habitats
Subcanopy plants include arrowweed, squaw waterweed, alkali goldenbush, and young individuals of species in the overstory. Forbs and grasses include alkali ...
Mojave - Trade, Exchange, Storage
... travel for the sake of travel-seeing other lands and visiting people. The Mojaves stored their corn in huge granaries woven of unstripped arrowweed branches.
Palm Oasis Wildlife Habitats
Subcanopy plants include arrowweed (Burk 1977), squaw waterweed (Küchler 1977), alkali goldenbush (Burk 1977), and young individuals of species in the ...
Devil's Cornfield - Death Valley
Clumps of salt withstanding Arrowweed appear as shocks of corn in a harvest field. The presence of the plant growing on the sandy mounds indicate a shallow ...
Indian use of Native Plants
Mesquite wood was used as fuel for fires, to make bows and arrows, and to ... Noxious weeds such as come up thickly in crowded fields do not flourish in the free ...
Southern Paiute Shelter/Homes
A covering of cane, arrowweed or grass, depending on what is at hand, was added for the walls, and perhaps some mud along the base. The doorway faced ...
Stovepipe Wells Sand Dune Field
However, the local wind pattern is obviously more complex because just east of the dunes is the Devil's Cornfield, an area of deflation with arrow-weed shocks ...
