They were all hanging around the rocky top of a slope where the dirt was thin, mostly drinking in the sunlight and waiting for rain to fall. They were taller than most of the dune scrub around them, maybe the height of a big dog, with greenish-yellow leaves about the shape of blades of grass but thick, and hairy. I noticed that even when the breeze blew, their leaves didn't move.

"Are you guys tarweeds?" I asked.

They guffawed. "You a tarweed, Joe?" one asked another.

Joe cried in falsetto, "No! I'm a silver lupine!" and held up three or four leaves pressed together. Another went bug-eyed, shouting "I'm a coffee berry!" There were impersonations of dandelions, sea-thrift, yarrow and, last and least, "pht-pht-pht! I'm a popcorn flower!"

When the hilarity died down I was still there, still waiting for an answer. Finally one of them said, "Yeah. I'm a tarweed. Have you got a problem with that?"

"No, I-"

"Didn't think so." He tossed a little dust in the air with a lower leaf and caught it in an upper. "What are you doing here?"

"Just sunning."

"Yeah, well this sun here is ours. We grow where we want, and we stay till we feel like leaving," a larger plant informed me. The amount of grit on the undersides of his leaves was impressive.

"Where you want. That's cool. Why'd you pick this place? Whoever picked it, I mean. Who was the firstŠ"

"That was gramps," said a tall, gangly plant. "Can't argue with gramps. Oh, no. Once he made up his mind he was gonna sprout, we all had to sprout."

"Hey, cut that out about gramps," ordered the big one. "Hillside is good. Bare hillside, rocky, not too wet, not too many neighbors around. You oughta be grateful."

"Was there anything here at the time?" I asked.

He suppressed a smile. "Whatever was here isn't here any more. We like to grow in thick, all of us together, right, Nickie?" He cast a leaf around the gangly one.

Nickie pulled away. "Ugh, get your hair off me."

"Sticky leaves stick together! We're one big happy tarweed family."

"Get off. You're not sticky, you're full of dirt." He rubbed his leaves on his stem. "And you, what are you, a reporter? Here's my comment, pal: Leave us alone. Don't come in here. Get back to where you belong."

"Do any plants try to grow here?" I couldn't help looking around. It was pretty rocky dirt, and what looked like pieces of asphalt stuck up through the stubble and grit. "Invasives? Radish, for example."

Joe snorted. "Radish has a taproot about the size of my shortest leaf. Bring him on. I need a good laugh. Radish. You're scaring me! He's scaring me, guys."

The guys hooted. "Yeah, what else you got? Thistle?" one said, and another, "Yeah, milk thistle." Any ripgut grass that tried to grow here would get it's gut ripped, all right, and Ehrhardia grass was airy-grassy-wassy swish. Iceplant? They'd ice it and plant it for sure. And so it went. I said, "OK, I get the picture."

"Good," said Joe. "And for all the worms and bugs and field mice, listen, don't come waltzing in if you haven't got what it takes to waltz out again. We don't need little animals stuck all up and down our stems. I get tired of telling the guys to scrape up things that didn't know how to behave."

Nickie hunched, muttering sullenly. "They track dirt all over us and then they say we're ugly. Nobody calls gum-plant ugly. Nobody calls sticky monkey-plant ugly‹"

Joe tapped my chest with a leaf for emphasis, "We are not ugly. We're green, aren't we? What do you want? Green stalk, green leaves. Not all that lacy silver-lupine stuff."

There was no joking now. "Least we're not bushes," put in a rather short one. "Bushes are disgusting."

"Really?"

"They spread out all over the place like some kind of tumor, and then they lie down and sit there. They just sit." Others agreed. "Next year, same bush is sitting there, wider. How boring is that."

"They live a lot longer than you do," I agreed.

"They'd probably be glad if lightning hit them, they're so bored."

Gangly Nickie put in, "I'd rather be dead." He trailed the grimy underside of a leaf along my cheek as though considering. "We die pretty soon, you know. Not much to live for."

"Come on. You've got flowers, haven't you?"

This met with an unfriendly silence at first. "Yeah, what about it?" someone demanded. But after a pause Joe said, "Flowers? Sure, we got them. Yellow. They're OK." He paused.

"Joe's are more than OK," remarked the short one.

Joe nodded. "You ought to come around when they're out. Kind of bright, you know, with the sun on them when they open up in the middle of the day." The others chuckled. A few made buzzing sounds to suggest pollination, and they all began to strike up other conversations, as plants do to move away in embarrassment. "Yeah, the flowers are all right," Joe concluded. He looked sternly at me. "For you, it's look all you want, but don't touch."

"Understood."

"Bees, flies, all right," he said. Long as they behave. Just come in and carry the pollen and go, that's no problem. When there's no wind, that is, or you'll be blowing up against something. Come in when it's quiet. I don't mind that."

"So even the insects don't come here much," I said. "And that's how you like it."

He looked me in the eye. "You figure we like being the ones everybody hates and living where nobody comes near? Yeah, maybe we do. Might be better than living next to an idiot who believes that."

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