One of Earth's oldest plants sits in the Calif. desert, and no one cares: A small masterpiece was 11,700 years

One of Earth's oldest plants sits in the Calif. desert, and no one cares
A small masterpiece was 11,700 years in the making
https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/desert-road-ice-age-secret-20798538.php?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

By Farley Elliott, SoCal Bureau ChiefAug 4, 2025

The bouncy washboard road leading out to California’s King Clone site probably didn’t exist 11,700 years ago. Why would it? Cars wouldn’t be invented or seen for another 11,550 years (give or take) in this corner of what is today called the Mojave Desert. Elsewhere on the globe, Homo sapiens were just starting to figure out agriculture, transforming from hunter-gatherer societies into taut communities that stayed in place. The pyramids of Egypt were still thousands of years off.

But out here, on a sandy high desert stretch between Joshua Tree and Barstow, a seedling was bursting through the soil in search of sunlight. Eventually, the shy little superstar of the current Holocene epoch fully came into its own, setting deep roots into the cool ground that have, all these thousands of years later, remained dutifully intact.

The scrubby little creosote bush, known as King Clone, sits in an untidy ring just off Bessemer Mine Road (if you can call it a road), not far from Pioneertown. What looks like an oblong collection of bushes is actually a single, thriving clonal colony with a genetically unique starting point buried underground. That first plant from all those thousands of years ago has, in essence, been regenerating slowly for close to 12,000 years, a single living organism that’s as old as the ice age. King Clone, for all intents and purposes, is among the oldest living anything on this planet.

The average passerby, what few there are, likely wouldn’t know where King Clone begins and ends or when the rest of the ruddy desert chaparral takes over. Larrea tridentata, the formal name for this flowering creosote bush (often called greasewood in the Wild West novels on your father’s bookshelf), looks all the same across a landscape as vast as this. What makes King Clone different is its shape, which is larger than normal, and the underground connectivity of the bushy little nodes that have pressed to the surface, forming an aboveground arrangement of bushes in a relatively neat oval. It’s that unusual ring that made the late UC Riverside professor Frank C. Vasek take notice nearly 50 years ago, prompting a 1980 paper in the American Journal of Botany that hypothesized that King Clone could, indeed, be 11,700 years old.........................

One of Earth's oldest plants sits in the Calif. desert, and no one cares

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Fencing and signage at the King Clone Ecological Reserve in Johnson Valley, Calif.
Farley Elliott/SFGATE



HERE IS THAT OVAL RING THAT IS TALKED ABOUT IN THE ARTICLE:

https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/53/73/34/28292908/3/ratio3x2_640.webp
The King Clone creosote bush in Johnson Valley, Calif., on July 20, 2008.
Klokeid via Wikimedia