The Desert Candle is truly an unusual looking plant. The plant itself resembles a tall candle with a flame on top! It’s stalk is yellow and linear, averaging about 28-30 inches tall (roughly 70 cm) with small, reddish-purple flowers atop that with four petals, so it resembles a beautiful candle in the desert. It is a member of the Brassicaceae Family, and is also called Squaw Cabbage.
The “inflatus” part of the name refers to the stalk that is very rigidly upright and puffed out in the center but generally hollow inside. It is endemic to California, with its home base (habitat) in the northern Mojave Desert in California (not far from Ridgecrest, on level ground at the foot of the Panamint Mountains (which rise to form the western wall of Death Valley), and on the eastern side of the Coastal Range bordering the Central Valley.
Caulanthus inflatus is an annual that blooms in the spring on open range land at the southern end of the Panamints. The CalFlora database shows it growing on ridges just east of Pinnacles National Park in San Benito County, California, near the central part of the state. We found it in the Southern California Mojave desert/Death Valley in Kern County.
Gardening with Desert Candle
Sorry, but we have not grown this desert plant nor collected seed to plant.