Plant PR

In visiting King Clone the other day, a few things came to mind.

First, since it's no longer the oldest living thing on the planet, Americans don't really care much about it. It used to be number one, back before some discoveries in the past few years, but it's now dropped to third or possibly fourth, with the result that most people may think of it as an oddity more than anything worth seeing.

Still, it's out there, and not too far from my desert home.

Plants have a tough time of it, and not just those trying to eke out an existence in the high desert where there's very little rain and they're forced to live in sand composed of deconstructed granite.

Worse, other than vegans, vegetarians, and some foodies and gardeners, no one cares very much about the half of life that isn't animals. Even the best of plants aren't anywhere near as cute as a kitty and, to be frank, they don't exactly do very much. Oh, sure, some of them are pretty, but other than suffering the ravages of neglect and dying inside the home, if they can't be eaten or used as building supplies or fuel, we pretty much leave them alone.

In the case of King Clone, it (or he), is very much left alone, which is probably a good thing.

It may be over an 11,000 year old plant, but being located on the outskirts of an Off Road Vehicle area didn't bode well for its seeing its 12,000 birthday. So, someone put a wire fence around the area it's living in, which is about the only thing that sets it apart from everywhere else in the desert.

It used to be said of Microsoft that their policy against computer viruses and whatnot was keeping all their software secret. Whoever is interested in, or maybe even responsible for, keeping King Clone around, is taking a page from that book. I'm not sure there were ever going to be crowds of people flocking to look at an old plant, but there are certainly no lines of visitors, no souvenir booths, nothing in the way of guides or even signs. It's there, and if you want to look at it, you've got to find it.

Which, maybe I did.

Being unmarked has the advantage of keeping away the merely curious, which is probably a good thing in this land of rugged individualists. It's unlikely that anyone would just shoot it for the hell of it, but I wouldn't put it past those who haven't yet learned to put up with being told what to do or whose desires are solely driven by what they want, might just want to kick it, pluck at it, run over it, or otherwise destroy or injure it just for the hell of it. People are like that.

Since I'm guessing most people don't even know it's there, it's very much left alone.

The only indication I found of its location was placed by what I can only imagine are hippies since they made a tiny cairn on the roadside and a small arrow of rocks pointing under the fence. I hoped a similar cairn would exist inside, indicating King Clone's location, but I didn't see any.

What I did see was, of course, thousands of those creosote bushes, some in rings. Whether or not I saw King Clone is up for debate, but even with knowing that it was it, I'm confident I saw it since my eye past over pretty much everything in the area.

If it's still out there, I must have seen it.

(This website – http://www.lucernevalley.net/creosote/photo_tour.htm – does a better job than I could ever hope to do) The signs he saw, I didn't.