Origin of The Desert Marigold

Hello! I figured it's about time to introduce myself again as I continue along this journey as The Desert Marigold. My name is Sierra - born & raised in California, currently residing on the North Coast in Davenport. It's been my dream since high school to pursue an artistic career, curating style and art for my community, and here I am, finally doing the thing! It's been very exciting these past 8 months, while the concept of The Desert Marigold has been floating around in my brain for ages, I only started this business back in August!

A bit about me: I have always loved vintage clothes, psychedelic rock, a good band tee, and mother nature (being a California baby all these things come fairly naturally). I made my way to Santa Cruz to study at UCSC. My background is in Environmental Science, focusing on natural history, conservation, and botany. I am very grateful for all the time I spent studying in the field learning from the natural environment around me.

Now, for my name! The Desert Marigold does have an origin story, and it goes like this...

As I mentioned before, I studied botany in school, and fell in love, but that wasn't always the case. The story starts in a remote field station deep in the Mojave desert, the first field location of a 10 week field quarter I was in. Botany was part of the required course material, but I was very reluctant: large book, long Latin words, it seemed like such a massive task! But I gave in, and picked my first flower from the base of the Kelso Dunes to key out in the Jepson (iykyk). This is a long process, and my instructor was hesitant to embark on an Aster (Asteraceae is the sunflower family) being that it's one of the largest plant families, but I was committed. After three hours of getting stuck, finding genus but not species, I got up from the table incredibly flustered, giving up. As I walked to the kitchen to begin dinner, I passed one of those popular botanical posters on the wall.. you know what was on that poster?? THE DESERT MARIGOLD - the very flower my instructor and I had been chasing after all this time. Baileya multiradiata, the Desert Marigold, had been hanging RIGHT THERE on the wall next to me! I scoured guide books frantically, and all listed B. multiradiata right there for me to find.. how ridiculous I felt to chase this species in this fruitless pursuit.

It ended up being a great lesson in the complexities of keying out a species in the Jepson, and how exciting botany can be. For the rest of my field stay I absorbed all the botanical information I could, and have stayed fairly knowledgeable on California native botany, which is wonderful! My ongoing love affair with The Desert Marigold began, and the rest is history!