The Collaborative International Dictionary
Creosote bush \Cre"o*sote bush\ A shrub ( Covillea mexicana) found in desert regions from Colorado to California and southward through Mexico. It has yellow flowers and very resinous foliage with a strong odor of creosote.
Wiktionary
n. The medicinal herb (taxlink Larrea tridentata species noshow=1).
WordNet
n. desert shrub of southwestern United States and New Mexico having persistent resinous aromatic foliage and small yellow flowers [syn: coville, hediondilla, Larrea tridentata]
Usage examples of "creosote bush".
They hunted lizards and snakes and coneys, collected the juicy young pads of prickly pear and dug for tuberous roots in the dry tableland above the cliffs, picked samphire and watercress in the marshes by the margin of the river and waded out into the river's shallows and cast circular nets to catch fish, which they smoked on racks above fires built of creosote bush and pine chips.
With its brittle wood and rank, tarry-smelling leaves, the creosote bush would blaze like a torch after a few hours drying in the sun.
There were patches of dry lake, bare of vegetation for the most part, and, of course, the creosote bush everywhere.
It was studded here and there with the low sprawling creosote bush with its yellow-green-gray waxy leaves, a shrub that robbed the soil around it of moisture and nutrients until nothing else could grow.
You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves.
Someone had tossed a creosote bush into the dying embers of the fire.
She bent her head toward a creosote bush, got down on her hands and knees.
The low, dark green shrubs were creosote bush, the lacy-leafed taller ones were mesquite.
The desert smelled of clean cold air, a hint of dry creosote bush.
Then, as the desert rose from smooth plain to mountains, the ground became simply broken rock, sparsely dotted with creosote bush and cholla.
Various varieties of cacti, with little herds of javlina browsing on the pods of some of them, clumps of gray and tan desert grasses waving their autumn seed stems, the orderly scattering of creosote bush, and species of mesquite new to her and swarming with bees attracted by the honey in the flowers, and brush with more thorns than leaves.
A small creosote bush was undercut and it, too, disappeared into the vitreous umbra.
The scent that lay over everything was that of the ubiquitous yellow creosote bush.
Most, shy beneath the sage and greasewood and creosote bush, I did not recognize by name.