Town Sees Beauty in Desert Weeds

This is a place of extremes, where temperatures soar above the century mark and drop low enough for occasional snow. Where arid, cloudless months give way to sudden rains as fierce as any monsoon.

The desert blooms then, softened by a brief blur of green and spiked with the purples, reds and golds of wildflowers. When the blossoms fade they leave their skeletons, a geometry of fawn and ash that mirrors the sand.

And so, with a kind of offbeat logic, residents of this Mojave Desert town hold their annual Weed Show this weekend. The easy, showy beauty of garden flowers does not cut it here. Instead, they find splendor in the grass, and in the sage and the saltbush.

Located at the Old Schoolhouse Museum just off the main road through town, the yearly gathering has become a tourist attraction, as well as a clue to the people who hold it.

“We do things in a different way here,” said Liz Meyer, the mayor of Twentynine Palms. Born and raised in the town, she still drives the 1931 Model A Ford she used in high school.

“Anyone can have a flower show,” Meyer said. “But it takes a special kind of person to see the beauty in weeds.”

Weeds have eclipsed flowers here since July 1940, when the Twentynine Palms Women’s Club convened for its monthly luncheon. When the guest speaker learned the ladies were ashamed they could not provide fresh flowers for the podium, she abandoned her lecture on etchings. Instead, she sent several members into the desert to collect weeds.

“That’s right,” said Ada Hatch, the mayor’s 90-year-old mother, who attended that meeting. “We went out and brought back all sorts of weeds, which she arranged into bouquets with the most delightful compositions. That was the start of it all.”

More than five decades later, the Weed Show is an annual event complete with theme, categories, rules, judges and ribbons. This year’s motif, “Can You Believe It?--Changes That Have Taken Place in This Millennium,” is expected to draw more than 250 entries. The show is free and runs all day Saturday and Sunday.

Competitors use weeds, antiques and found objects to make their bouquets. Categories range from miniature arrangements the size of a teacup to heroic displays stationed outside the Old Schoolhouse Museum, the area’s original school.

A special “purple glass, survivors and casualties” category elevates two challenges of desert living--the searing sun and the occasional earthquake--into advantages. Purple glass forms when clear glass made with manganese turns violet in the sun. The “casualties” subcategory gives purple glass lovers who had bad luck in the recent temblor a way to exhibit their damaged collections.

“I think we all have the ingredients for the ‘casualties’ category,” said Pat Rimmington, chairwoman of this year’s Weed Show. “But our earthquakes are just one of the joys of High Desert living.”

Rimmington said 1,200 people attended last year’s show, a number that includes tourists visiting the nearby Joshua Tree National Park. People from Los Angeles, Riverside and Palm Springs and as far as Germany, Italy and Australia stopped by to admire the weeds.

Sid Rimmington, president of the Twentynine Palms Historical Society, shares his wife’s British accent and her wry, dry sense of humor. Standing in the shade of the 1929 adobe the couple own, a glass of water sweating in his hand, he looked across the dry lake bed to the mountains.

“A lot of people are drawn to this area, but not many of them stay,” he said. ‘It takes a special person to live here; it helps if you’re a bit peculiar.”

And thick-skinned.

Although high-profile residents such as legendary surf guitarist Dick Dale and PBS perennial Huell Howser love the High Desert peace and quiet, some visitors do not see any charm.

Outside Magazine has described Twentynine Palms as “the big empty,” “a slapped-together sprawl of fast-food joints, pawnshops, and no-tell motels,” and “the last stop on the planet for deadbeats, loners, and dropouts.”

But residents of this community of 15,000 shrug at such attacks. It’s a price they pay to live in the High Desert, where a nice house still costs $50,000 and you can see the stars at night, but not the air you breathe.

“I’ve brought my friends out here and they get it,” said Nicole Panter, a Santa Monica-based author and teacher who bought a house on 15 acres several years ago. She plans to move to the area full time when she retires.

These days, Panter makes the 2 1/2-hour drive to spend weekends and holidays at her house--and, of course, to work on her weed show entry.

She and a friend are working on an arrangement for the “Smoke Signal to E-mail” category.

“I love it here--I loved it right away,” she said. “It’s like Northern Exposure in the Mojave. Everything is delightfully off-kilter.”