Candalia Globosa is a rare desert plant in the Southern California desert, for which I’m very grateful because there’s no others on my property, just the one that I chopped apart with a large pair of limb loppers this morning and finished off with a chainsaw.
It grew beside my chicken coop, long empty now of chickens, and I’ve been ignoring it until this summer when it suddenly grew like crazy and limbs covered half the coop. The bush, or tree, whatever it’s technically called, is probably about 40 years old. Being a desert plant, it’s used to not having much water until it gets big enough with a deep and large enough root system to hog all the underground moisture anywhere near.
The problem with this plant is that the branches are covered with little limbs that are actually two to three inch long poisonous spines with little leaves along their length that hide these spines. The limbs grow at crazy angles and it would be very easy for small animals to get tangled in them and die from poisonous puncture wounds, which may be a way this bush from Hell helps feed itself.
When I saw how large it grew I knew I finally had to deal with it. I put it off all these years because of those thorns. However, between a pair of long-handled limb loppers, my chainsaw and exercising great care I was able to reduce it to a big pile of 3 foot long or smaller limbs without getting stabbed once.
This is a true case of 100s of millions of years of plant evolution learning to protect itself being defeated by a half-million years of evolution of a primate with a chainsaw. So let that be some sort of lesson to something.