Monte Desert Monte Desert The Monte Desert is a South American ecoregion, lying entirely within Argentina and covering approximately the submontane areas of Catamarca, La Rioja, San Juan, San Luis and Mendoza Provinces, plus the western half of La Pampa Province and the extreme north of Río Negro Province. The desert lies southeast of the Atacama Desert in Chile, north of the larger Patagonian Desert, east of the Andes and west of the Sierra de Córdoba. The delineations between the Monte Desert, the Atacama Desert, and the Patagonian Desert are not exact and the desert seems to be more-or-less continuous with the
Dicentra formosa on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. Subsp. "oregana" grows in a small area of southern Oregon and northern California in serpentine soils in the Siskiyou Mountains. These subspecies are also distinguished by appearance: "Dicentra formosa" is widely grown as a garden plant, and several cultivars have been developed. Those marked have gained the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit: There are several hybrid cultivars involving "D. formosa", the eastern American species "D. eximia" and the Japanese species "D. peregrina": The Pacific bleeding-heart ("Dicentra formosa" subsp. "formosa") was first noted by Europeans when the Scottish surgeon and naturalist