Ancient creosote shrubs at the Cadiz Dunes wilderness.
I got to spend an afternoon last week at one of my favorite places, the Cadiz Dunes wilderness east of the Sheephole Valley, in San Bernardino County, California. Cadiz Dunes is a roughly 20,000 acre dune field where windblown sand swirling from the Cadiz dry lake bed is deposited between the Old Woman Mtns in the east and the Calumet Mtns to the west.
The creosote shrubs at Cadiz Dunes are impressively large and presumably, quite old. Over time, many of the big ones have accumulated sand into hillocks from which the shrubs grow as seen in the photo below.
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So the creosote plant helps itself grow by manipulating its environment!
I hadn't realized that plants could do such a thing.
Yeah, it's pretty cool. Mangroves do something similar in coastal waters. As they grow bigger, they trap sediment from the water, which builds mud islands over time.
These particular creosotes are pretty old, and on the edge of the dune field there is always some blowing sand. When it hits those thickets of leaves and branches, the sand falls out of suspension. Over time it accumulates. The sides of those hillocks are studded with old dead roots and stems sticking out, which fertilize the sand, and the hillocks are riddled with small animal burrows, which also eat the seeds, help disperse them, and poop nearby. It's a mini-ecosystem! 