Profiles of natives: Big sagebrush

Richard Cabe, Salida train station, 1951

When my late husband and his family moved to our small town in the Southern Rockies from Arkansas in the early 1950s, my sister-in-law remembers their father paying the kids something like a nickel a day to clear their new front yard of “cactus and weeds” to make way for a lawn.

Forty-some years later, when Richard and I moved back to his childhood home-town, we bought a blighted industrial parcel on which to build our home. And then carefully restored the very “cactus and weeds”–the native shortgrass mountain prairie–his father had paid the kids to yank out.

We never even considered a lawn, in part because with an average annual precipitation of just under nine inches, lawns here require too much water–and fertilizer, weedkiller, mowing, and effort we preferred to spend identifying the hummingbirds, butterflies, and native bees that winged in to visit our wildflowers.

The deeper reason though had to do with wanting to belong to this new/old home, and a feeling that restoring the native dryland prairie would nurture both the site and our emerging terraphilia. The native plant community, we thought, would root us in place here, too.

With a tiny budget for restoration, most of our funds went to a custom seed mix of native species carefully selected to survive on our harsh industrial soil. But we saved a bit of cash to buy specimen plants–mostly shrubs, the native overstory in our cold-desert climate–to give some instant color to what was then a very large dirt yard.

A venerable big sagebrush, perhaps more than a century old

Top on my list was big sagebrush, the region’s totemic plant. (Seraphidium [Artemisia] tridentatum in the language of science)

For some people, home is the place where they were born, or the territory of their childhood. For me, it’s the territory of my heart: a swath of landscape that smells like big sagebrush, that gray-green and fragrant shrub which some dismiss as a “weed” even though its roots on this continent stretch back at least 25 million years.

A Nevada valley gray-green with big sagebrush

Big sagebrush is the most common shrub in North America, and it is exclusively a westerner, spreading in aromatic “seas” from the western Great Plains to the coast ranges, from the northern Southwest to southern Canada. It is the signature plant of the cold deserts, naturally dry landscapes that derive much of their precipitation from snow.

Big sagebrush sprouts twisting stems ranging from one to six feet tall depending on the site, covered with gray, peeling bark that makes flammable tinder and strong twine. It often forms single-species swaths with even-height canopies; its evergreen leaves are small, insulated with a silver-gray felt of hairs and split into three blunt tips.

Evergreen leaves covered with insulating hairs

Sniff a sprig of sagebrush and your nose fills with a pungent mix sometimes described as turpentine and camphor sweetened with honey and orange blossoms.

The seemingly monotonous cover of this characteristic shrub is as critical to the health of the landscapes where it grows as pine and fir forests are in the adjacent mountains. Like a forest overstory, the canopy provided by big sagebrush shades the soil, protecting the surface from both searing daytimes and frigid nights. It slows the wind, retards evaporation, and traps airborne dust and detritus rich in organic matter and mineral nutrients.

The fragrant canopy also captures rain, channeling that precious moisture down the trunk to filter into the soil instead of sheeting off the surface, and collects its own mini-snowdrifts in winter, which supply extra moisture in spring.

Pronghorn with twin fawns in spring sagebrush

Hundreds of wildlife species depend on big sagebrush for homes and food, from pronghorn antelope to eye-catching black and white sagebrush sheepmoths.

Some of these species cannot survive without the shrub, including the sage thrasher, which nests in the aromatic shrub, and the emblematic and unforgettable sage-grouse, which may walk tens of miles between windswept winter sagebrush range and summer habitat in moist sagebrush meadows.

Male Gunnison sage-grouse "dancing" to impress watching females (and how could they resist that crazed avian chorus-girl imitation?) Photo courtesy Western State College

We don’t usually think of “behavior” and communication as qualities of plants, but big sagebrush’s adaptations to the relentless aridity and wide climatic swings of its environment include aspects of both.

Big sagebrush turns its leaves edgewise to searing sun and drying wind throughout the day, actively moving its foliage to prevent sunburn and dehydration.

And it communicates: the plant’s characteristic odor comes from a complex of chemicals it manufactures to render itself unpalatable to grazers. When these defenses fail, big sagebrush sounds a chemical alarm, releasing an aromatic air-raid siren that causes other plant species to flood their tissues with undigestible compounds.

No wonder then, that big sagebrush is considered an ecological pillar of its community, nurturing other species and rendering its harsh environment more hospitable for its neighbors. Without big sagebrush, these landscapes often dismissed as desolate would be truly deserted. For me, this shrub and its singular fragrance simply say “home.”

Big sagebrush makes a lovely backdrop for daffodils in spring

(Excerpted in part from my memoir, Walking Nature Home, A Life’s Journey.)

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