Friday flowers…red

Also the name of one of my favorite dramatic comedy movies. Or humorous dramas. Whatever. Favorite. 🙂

And for Becky: close-up. 🙂

for SquareUp 1.22.21

Friday flowers…uplifting

Descanso Gardens again. Even in November there were flowers. Of course November in southern California isn’t December in many other places, but it that made it even more of a joy to see. It was UPlifting.

for SquareUp 1.15.21

Friday flowers for the day after

for Six Word Saturday 12.26.20

Friday flowers…rustic

In Descanso Gardens, even the small places are attractive.

Friday flowers…in light

Fantastic fuzzy Friday flower frenzy

You’ve seen these flowers before with the giant bees but datura, although highly poisonous, does not discriminate. Perhaps it’s woke. I don’t know. But I do know bees of all sizes go crazy for these flowers and why not? There’s lots of room to maneuver, the better to collect that pollen, my dear!

I’m on a driving trip to our daughter and son-in-law’s in southern California for a short while, so forgive me if my visits get a bit spotty, although I’m planning to try to keep up on both comments and visits. Yes, I’ll be very, very careful as well. 🙂

Friday flowers…a tale of two seasons

We’ve been in Arizona just over 7 months now, almost 6 of them summer, and we’re now evidently in the second blooming of plants and flowers. When we moved here, I visited Lowe’s with their enormous selection of veggies and plants, excited to fill my two raised beds with tomato (heat-resistant), snap peas, Greek oregano, tarragon, and, most exciting of all, an artichoke! I’d enhanced the soil and put a protective cover over the top on the advice of my brother. I watered pretty much daily.

Did I tell you we had a record-setting number of days over 110 and some other sort of heat record? We did. The peas went first, the parsley dried on the stalk rather than having to be dried out in the house. The tomatoes had lots of fruit-in-the-making until they didn’t. The tarragon wilted, the artichoke too, and even the Greek oregano (I’d expected better from it) finally had to be pulled up as well.

Once I bought a small book on planting in Arizona, I found the advice basically to be: Don’t plant from about May-October. I never did figure out why Lowe’s was selling plants unlikely to live. The plants and flowers in our yard hung in there when watered regularly, cacti don’t need much. Now that it’s cooled off, 70’s and 80’s, plants and flowers are making a comeback. You can almost hear their sigh of relief. This is the flower or the creosote bush and the grey fuzzy things are actually fruit.

Just realized today is Friday the 13th, my lucky day. Hope yours is good as well.

Friday flowers

I’m taking us back to Illinois for these Friday flowers, because we all need some beauty in our day. I hope your Friday is as beautiful as these flowers.

Friday flowers…fairy duster

With a name like that, you’d expect something special…and you’d get it. I’m not sure if fairies use it for dusting or if you dust fairies with it, but either way I’d love to have a supply of them in my cleaning closet or in my garden.

Pretty is as pretty does.

While viewing yesterday’s osprey, I chatted with a couple, then shared with them where the white flowers are once again blooming off the beaten path. You’ve seen these before, once in a video and in a macro. But this time I had a bit of a surprise. They knew exactly what these beautiful flowers were and they weren’t what I expected.

The couple told me that these are datura and very poisonous! As for names? Moonflower sounds nice, but devil’s weed, hell’s bells and devil’s trumpet? Not so much.

Datura is a genus of nine species of poisonous vespertine flowering plants belonging to the family Solanaceae. They are commonly known as thornapples or jimsonweeds but are also known as devil’s trumpets (not to be confused with angel’s trumpets, which are placed in the closely related genus Brugmansia). Other English common names include moonflower, devil’s weed and hell’s bells. The Mexican common name toloache (also spelled tolguacha) derives from the Nahuatl tolohuaxihuitl, meaning “the plant with the nodding head” (in reference to the nodding seed capsules of Datura species belonging to section Dutra of the genus). Wikipedia

Datura wrap-up waiting to bloom…