My newest watercolor map continues my current series inspired by islands of native ecology within cities. But as you can guess from the title Oasis II, at the same time it relates back to an earlier work on a different theme, and to another type of ecological island.

This new map represents the Lomas de Lúcumo, an urban park and nature reserve in Lima, Peru that contains one of many seasonal “fog oases” scattered throughout this desert region—places where mountains intercept the coastal fog layer to create unlikely islands of brilliant green. (Unlike the kind of oasis that most of us are familiar with, then, the water comes from above rather than below.) Oasis (I), completed a few years ago, deals with the same phenomenon, but an example much farther south in north-central Chile where the desert is comparatively lush—dense with giant cacti—and the oasis is an actual forest. In most of coastal Peru though the desert is essentially barren and the lomas (literally “hills”) are a mix of shrubland and grassland or occasionally savanna. Actually an even earlier map, Fog Meadows, depicts another one of these oases a few hours north of Lima that’s ecologically much more similar to Lúcumo than the one I capture in Oasis.