Desert Garden

This guide to the Desert Garden at San Diego's Natural History Museum starts with something missing: half its cacti and succulents carry no name tags, a response to decades of theft in a garden with no fence, no gate and no closing time. It traces the toll left on the plants themselves, from carved initials scarring soft succulent flesh to a dragon tree whose blood-red sap traders once mistook for something else entirely. You'll hear which desert species from Baja California, southern Africa and the Mojave have outlasted it all on almost no water. Look closely at the trunks as you pass for scars decades old.