On the other side of the mountains from coastal San Diego lies the Sonoran Desert, an ecoregion that spans multiple states in two countries. As Earth’s most biologically diverse desert, its intrinsic and aesthetic value is immeasurable.

As with many areas of the desert where human activity has disturbed the cryptobiotic crusts, invasive, highly flammable grasses and other weeds from overseas have set up shop in Galleta Meadows. It’s an impressive sculpture park that gets a lot of foot traffic—and car traffic despite the signs asking people to park along the road and walk a bit. There is, or was, a particularly grand desert lily I make a point of visiting there and it was nowhere to be found this spring. Its emergence may have been impacted by the mechanical method used to clear weeds from around the creosote shrubs; it shredded desert lily leaves and unearthed the bulbs of very young plants that were still close to the surface (they sink lower as the plants mature). I wish I'd documented the tiny, unearthed bulbs before frantically replanting them as best I could with my hands, but it didn’t cross my mind in the moment.