It is nearly endemic to the Baja California Peninsula (both the northern and southern states), with only a small population in the Sierra Bacha of Sonora, Mexico.

The plant's English name, Boojum, was given by Godfrey Sykes of the Desert Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona, and is taken from Lewis Carroll's poem "The Hunting of the Snark".

The flowers are visited by at least 15 species of bees in 11 genera, who pry open the inflexed corolla limbs to obtain the sweetened nectar and contact the protected stigma.

The type description was published twice and nearly identically, in the Proceedings of the California Academy of Natural Sciences and the San Francisco monthly periodical Hesperian in May 1860.

However, this taxonomic classification was created before the vegetative and floral structures of F. fasciculata and F. purpursii were understood, as these two species share intermediate characteristics between the genera Idria and Fouquieria.

As many other genera (Pachypodium, Euphorbia, Jatropha and Coreopsis) contain both woody and succulent species, and because there are few diagnostic characteristics to separate major groups within the family, the genus Idria has been merged into Fouquieria.

[5] This species occurs from sea level to up to 1450 meters in elevation on deep to shallow volcanic loams or clays to decomposed granite soils, on well-drained sites on hillsides, mesa, and alluvial plains.