A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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ocotillo
The ocotillo is a desert plant of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan that grows as a spray of long unbranched spiny wands rising from a single base, sometimes twenty feet, looking dead for most of the year. Within days of rain, it leafs out along the whole length of every stem, holds the leaves while the moisture lasts, drops them, and does it again, several times in a season. It carries tight clusters of scarlet tubular flowers at the tips in spring.
Etymology
The name is Mexican Spanish and it is a diminutive built on a word taken from Nahuatl, the Aztec language, meaning torch pine. The comparison is to the resinous pine used for torches, and it was applied to the ocotillo for the straight bundled stems. It is not a cactus and is not closely related to one; it belongs to a small family of its own.
Notes
Cut stems planted in a row root and grow, which is why ocotillo fences are standard around old ranch houses and gardens across the Southwest and northern Mexico: a living spined barrier that flowers. The flowers open at the right time for northbound hummingbirds, and the plant is a significant stop on that migration.