Ambrosia Species, Woolly Bursage, Woollyfruit Burr Ragweed

Per Jan Emming owner of the Destination:Forever Ranch and Gardens, a 40 acre desert botanical garden and sustainable living homestead in ...Read Morethe Arizona desert with a nursery:

These strongly resinous, fragrant shrubs that smell a bit like turpentine or coniferous tree sap are probably the hosts of the Orobanche cooperi in the photo, which attach to their roots and derive nutrients and water from their hosts. The flowering heads are male and female with the fuzzy soft ones being females, while the males are small yellowish buds above the fuzzy females. I should note that the male flowers are already dropped off of the plants - they just create a lot of pollen and then fall away, leaving the females to develop seeds, so the only ones evident in my pictures are the fuzzy females.

I actually enjoy the fragrance of the foliage. The fragrance is strong and somewhat resinous, not quite like pine sap, but pleasant and a bit spicy. Plants grow in wash channels and are sometimes flattened for a few months by flooding, but they quickly rebound to normal with new growth and benefit from the extra moisture.