Hey! Who’s really important here?

When all those flowers are gone, we’ll still be here. (If you’ve seen “The Three Amigos”, your mind is saying “I’m still here, El Guaopo.” 🙂 But I digress.

Ask what sort of plants grow in the desert and “cactus” will likely be the first answer for almost everyone. Cacti have been designed specifically to thrive in an environment where water is at a premium, heat at a maximum. The saguaro is the iconic cactus despite only growing in the Sonoran desert between sea level and 4,000 ft. Above that they’ll only grow on the southern, sunny side of a slope.

How best to capture and use water when there is so little? A long taproot and a plethora of wide-spreading roots just belowe the surface enable the saguaro to tap (pun intended) water well below the surface as well as whatever water just begins to soak into the ground. A thick waxy coating and hard spines prevent water loss and as the cactus accumulates water, the outside expands to store more and more water. That means a full cactus might weigh as much as a ton.

Some saguaro have many arms, others have none. Saguaro serve as favorite apartment buildings for birds and in spring and early summer are topped with beautiful white flowers. It’s not easy to get photos of them, though, because flowers are so high above a standing person. But don’t mess with a saguaro! Besides it being a class-four felony to cut one down, at least one saguaro has been know to take its own revenge:

In 1982, a man was killed after damaging a saguaro. David Grundman was shooting and poking at a saguaro cactus in an effort to make it fall. An arm of the cactus, weighing 230 kg (500 lb), fell onto him, crushing him and his car. The trunk of the cactus then also fell on him. The Austin Lounge Lizards wrote the song “Saguaro” about this death. ~Wikipedia

Remember that teddy bear cholla are NOT cuddly, despite their appealing name. The silvery spines are actually leaves but rather deadly ones Don’t cuddle with this teddy!

The prickly pear (focus on the prickly part) have long spines and fruit that is eaten in many countries and cultures. We had prickly pear lemonade once, the fruit giving it a beautiful deep pink color.

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #143 – Colorful April in our backyard

Color in April is different in Arizona than in every other place I’ve lived, starting from ground level up. Except for Steamboat Springs where April was mud season, April almost everywhere else starts with a carpet of green grass covered or at least dotted in many places by innumerable wildflowers. Not so in Arizona where in populated areas grass is replaced by a layer of rocks with individual or small groups of plants dotting it, and in the desert, not much of anything with the same individual or groups of plants. There is grass, but it requires large amounts of water, something I find irresponsible when you live in a desert.

Be that as it may, we were blessed in our rental house because we have a great variety of plants. Most of the other rentals I viewed had nothing in the backyard and I mean nothing, nothing but “dirt” and “dirt” here is a cement-like thing called caliche, nothing like in the Midwest where you can easily sink a shovel into the earth almost anywhere. One of the nicknames of caliche is “hardpan” for a reason.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t beauty and color, such as this yellow trumpet bush which just showed up one day in a corner where it appeared nothing was growing, a welcome surprise! We have another much larger bush of these and an enormous one with orange flowers.

Red yucca isn’t really yucca (go figure) but its flowers are beautiful. There are streets with a row of these along the side which makes for very attractive landscaping.

As far as I can ascertain, this is Britton’s wild petunia, one of the flowers the bees love but one that can be invasive.

You can’t have a colorful April in Arizona without the spectacular flowers and fruits found on the cacti that are everywhere. There may be thorns on many plants but there’s also luxurious beauty and sometimes food, as in the case of the fruit of the prickly pear cactus you see here. These will open up.

Finally, there are these short-blooming, one day, flowers found on the trumpet cactus. Our cactus is small, but welcomed us with three rounds of gorgeous flowers when we moved here just over a year ago and has already has two flowers this year.

Now that we’ve seen some of the April color in our backyard, have a seat on the patio and just relax for a bit. I’m always happy when you stop by and I have some delicious jasmine green tea if you’re so inclined or some iced English breakfast.

Monday walk…Careful where you step!

Let’s take a closer look at a few of the cacti found in Saguaro National Park. One of the first places to get out and walk that we encountered was a paved loop giving great views of a variety of cacti, a number of which were in flower or had fruit. There’s quite a bit of room between many of the cacti, but be careful where you step and don’t back up without looking!

Here’s a lovely bunch of prickly pear cactus with fruit. Prickly pear jelly can be found in the Southwest and the fruit can be eaten but you have to be very careful to completely removed the outside so no spines of any size are left. I think I’ll stick with jelly!

When I started this post I didn’t realize that cholla, the type of cactus I’m showcasing next, used to be part of the same genus as prickly pear, despite what this information board says, but have now been separated because of some differences we wouldn’t notice, . However, the board does show how important each part of the desert flora and fauna are.

I also didn’t realize that there are boatload of species of opuntia, not a hundred, but a LOT! If you’re interested in identifying the flowers, this is (un)likely to help and made me laugh:

The flowers are typically large, axillary, solitary, bisexual, and epiperigynous, with a perianth consisting of distinct, spirally arranged tepals and a hypanthium.

If you do know what all those mean, do NOT tell us or I will ban you from the blog and flog you with a wet noodle or possibly o-puntia you across the desert for being a showoff!

Friday flowers…prickly

As behooves us now living a desert climate, here’s a desert flower, the flower of the prickly pear cactus. We have two somewhat small prickly pears in the backyard, but they have a prodigious number of flowers waiting to bloom.