Flora

I wanted to start this post with a drawing of the Roman goddess Flora, but alas, I haven't finished it. And with the rains things are changing so fast in the garden and elsewhere that these photos will just have to serve as my tribute to the goddess of flowers.

      The summer squash have been taking a beating from the heat, but with the cooler monsoon temps they look like they may recover.

Joe didn't think he liked okra 22 years ago when we planted our first garden together, but I persuaded him that the gorgeous flowers were worth it. Now he loves it (and the flowers). I like burgundy okra for the colorful stems and leaves that you can see here, and the pods (that turn green when you cook them).

 I saw this artichoke at the Tucson Botanical Gardens last Sunday. If you don't pick the big buds to eat them, you get this kind of spectacular beauty!

 Also at the botanical garden I found a display of potted adeniums, much bigger than the one in my kitchen window! But mine has sprouted two limbs since I posted a picture of it (http://morning-glory-garden.blogspot.com/2014/02/in-bleak-midwinter.html)  and it's getting ready to bloom again!

 This gorgeous sunflower is as big as a good-sized salad plate! My friend Caren gave me the seeds: Hopi Black Dye Sunflower from Native Seed Search (http://www.nativeseeds.org/), a fantastic organization specializing in seeds for desert-adapted plants. Can you see the bee at the lower right of the center, his back legs covered with pollen?

 These sunflowers are almost as big as the one above but I don't know what variety they are; they were part of a packet of mixed seeds, some of which did well while others couldn't take the heat (I'm guessing that was the problem, along with being savaged by birds before they had a chance to bloom).

 The chives are also in bloom, and I have lots of them, though I'm not sure why I grow so many since I don't use them all that often. But they're hardy and healthy and make a nice border. I think these are garlic chives.

 These pink rain lilies (zephyranthes) were a wonderful surprise yesterday afternoon, after two successive afternoons of good rain, a lovely line of them popped up all along the edge of this raised bed.  The monsoon was such a bust last year that I don't think we had any that bloomed, maybe one or two at most. But they've been biding their time and multiplying underground, more than I thought. Most of the year they look like chives, nothing but leaves, and as the leaves die they collect around the bases and aren't terribly attractive. Then almost all - sometimes all - the leaves die back and it looks very empty and sad until - voilá! - one day there's a nice line or cluster of them where you didn't expect to see anything at all! They're about 8" tall and remind me of the "naked ladies" that used to grow along a neighbor's driveway when I was growing up in Idaho, but those, I think, were amaryllis belladonna, much taller and highly poisonous.

There are many varieties of zephyranthes,  mostly in pink, white, or yellow. They're not very cold-hardy (zones 7-10), so it surprised me that the original bulbs for these came from my brother in Idaho. Maybe he took them up to store over the winter. Here in Arizona they thrive on my benign neglect with no particular care at all except watering and occasionally digging them up to thin them out and move some to different areas of the garden. They're such a delight, made all the more precious because they're so ephemeral, like so many beautiful things that lift our hearts and then disappear, things that appear right before our eyes but that we may not notice at all if we forget to pay attention.

Yellow

Yellow, seems it's everywhere one looks these days . . . like the yellow orchid vine that climbs a trellis outside our kitchen window,

 cassia blossoms,

or the Santa Rita prickly pear, which shows that nature knows how well yellow and purple go together.

Palo verde trees come in several varieties, so their bloom season is extended over several weeks,

(and more palo verdes, in the wash across the street from our house and marching up the hill).

Of course all those blossoms eventually drop in a rain of gold - these are in our driveway, crisp and crunchy underfoot.

This little wildflower lines the sidewalks and roadsides,

and the yellowbells (a wilder, hardier variety of the orange Tecoma stans seen in many yards) will eventually shoot back up to 6'-8' tall, filled with this year's blossoms and last year's seedpods.

The marvelous mesquite, one of the desert's hardiest plants is in blossom now, source of so many things, from wood (and charcoal) to the pods that provide nutritious flour and other foods, and the wonderful mesquite honey that helps keep my unfortunate allergy to mesquite under control. Just a spoonful in my first cup of tea or coffee in the morning for a homeopathic effect that, over time, has remarkable results.

Last but not least, the more common prickly pear, which I think is quite uncommon in its beauty and the sustenance its fruits and even its spiny pads offer to so many desert creatures, including humans (see my post on prickly pear jelly, http://morning-glory-garden.blogspot.com/search/label/prickly%20pear).

Purple

My earworm this afternoon is from Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado: "The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la." I have often noticed that in the Sonoran desert where we live, the native flowers tend to arrive in shades of purple and yellow. 

These little violas or johnny-jump-ups aren't native - I planted them from seed in an old wine barrel - but they fit the color scheme. Their barrel has also been colonized by volunteers more suited to the climate: epazote (the big leaf on the left), a very useful herb for those of us who love beans but would like to limit some of their more odorous after-effects, and on the right, the darker, pointier-leaved wild poinsettia, the ancestor of the much flashier red, pink, and white cultivars we see around Christmastime. Both plants reseed themselves with great abandon, and the poinsettias are easily transplanted if they show up in inconvenient spots.

        The blossoms below are on one of four eggplant bushes that survived the winter (such as it was here), as did the tomatoes and the jalapeno and Cubanelle peppers. All are bearing abundant fruits (that's a little baby eggplant in the upper right corner), though when the temperatures climb the tomatoes will continue to flower but stop setting fruit. A Japanese friend shared with me a traditional proverb: "Of eggplant blossoms and parental advice, only one in a thousand will go wrong."

Browallia is another reckless self-seeder. These plants also survived the winter and are now about 3 feet tall, though I'll probably cut them back as they've gotten rather scrawny and leggy.

Not everything currently in bloom is purple (or yellow), of course, though I'd say these big, shamelessly hot pink cactus blossoms come close. And yes, that's more wild poinsettia peeking out from behind the cactus. But that's okay. I know a bare spot where it should thrive and will look just great.

In the Bleak Midwinter . . . .

While that title will ring painfully true for many right now (even a couple of my friends in Portland, Oregon, who were so excited a few days ago about snow, are complaining about cabin fever), here in Tucson we've hardly had anything worth the name of winter. I actually miss it, though I can't complain about sitting outside right now, enjoying 74 degrees or so.

I've had this adenium obesum in my kitchen window for a couple of years, and every winter it drops leaves for a period of relative dormancy (and I try not to get too alarmed), but it's never bloomed before. There are still a couple of buds left to open to add to the already pretty showy cluster of blossoms - I am so excited!

But I'm even more excited about what I picked from the garden yesterday! We've had pepper plants survive for up to 5 years by protecting them from frosts, but never tomatoes or eggplants. (The larger peppers are Cubanelles, the smaller ones very hot jalapeños.) In fact, raising tomatoes here is problematic at best - some years I don't even try, and I almost didn't this year. The Big Boys and wonderful heirlooms that grow well elsewhere . . . well, I've never had any luck with them here, but cherry tomatoes . . . sometimes. Sometimes not. Everything on this platter was planted early last spring and the plants are still going strong. It's very strange and no doubt, like so much of the rest of the strange weather this year, related to global warming, so my gratitude for this beautiful harvest is necessarily tinged with unease. But I can't not appreciate the beauty and abundance.

 This is the blossom of the Golden Sweet Snow Pea, an heirloom variety from India. I purchased the seeds from Pinetree Garden Seeds, a small, family-owned seed company with very reasonable prices and packets sized right for small family gardens like ours, and a selection of seeds and other garden-related items one might not find elsewhere, like these gorgeous yellow snow peas! I picked a few this morning and there are lots more on the vines that aren't quite ready.

 A friend gave me a small plant of this strange and very prickly euphorbia whose last name I don't know. Hard to believe it's in the same family as poinsettia. Anyway, I have several larger pots of it now (just break off a piece and stick it in the soil) and they're all getting ready to bloom - just look at all the little pale green buds.

And the Meyer lemon, that's had a rather rough and unproductive year, is also bursting into bloom. I've been watching the buds and today found the first open blossom.

So the weather is crazy but lovely and I'm trying to just enjoy what we have and not think about the heat that's coming or the lack of rainfall here this "winter." I wish winter wasn't hitting so hard in other places, and if you're in one of those places, I hope things let up soon, and I wish you warmth, comfort, and good company.

Changing Times

Joe went back to work on Tuesday and I didn't; up till then it had just felt like our usual summer break rather than the R word. And I still don't feel retired, since my vision of that was days alone to pursue my creative and domestic projects. I'm not complaining, just acknowledging that, as John Lennon said, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans," like when the wind blows down a tree and the only practical, reasonable thing to do is to cut and stack it for firewood (and a playground for cactus wrens).

A week ago yesterday my mother had what fortunately turned out to be a small stroke-type event, a TIA or transient ischemic attack, but unlike that tree, she got back up and is recovering well. She spent two days in the hospital and has been with us since then, though she'll be going home on Sunday. I'm so glad to be able to be here for her, and she's a wonderful, undemanding "guest." My problem is in my own head: I feel guilty about taking time for myself to write or paint or whatever, though she's perfectly able to entertain herself. In fact, she'll probably be relieved to be free of my anxious hovering.
       One thing we enjoy together is wildlife in the backyard. While I'm watering, she circles the patio with her walker, and we observe things like the Texas ranger blooming in response to recent rains (this picture is from yesterday and already the blossoms are fading and dropping),

the goldfinches at their new feeder full of nyjer seed,

and the doves vacuuming up whatever falls to the ground.

Nyjer seed is pretty expensive, but I finally broke down and bought a sock feeder to see if it would attract the goldfinches that have been absent since our sunflower crop failed this year - usually we have lots of sunflowers and thus lots of these beautiful birds. You can see that the sock feeder worked: here are two female lesser goldfinches and a house finch (top right) on it,

 and here are a female and a male, in his lovely black tuxedo.

 But put the sock feeder up against a good monsoon and the monsoon wins, especially when they come three days in a row. The birds kept coming, but the seed in the middle would have been sprouting or fermenting or something, so we visited Wild Birds Unlimited http://www.wbu.com/, and bought the pretty yellow feeder for about $20 - we talked about making one but I don't think we could have done it for any less - and now not only does less seed fall to the ground but what's in the feeder has some protection from the rain, not necessarily from real hard-pounding rain with tree-whipping wind, but all in all better than the sock. In fact, it just began to rain again as I wrote that last sentence!
     Another change the last couple of days is that finally - finally! - my pepper plants are actually producing something! Here's a jalapeño (can you see the face on it?),

and here's a Cubanelle, a variety I've never planted before but when I saw them at Home Depot I liked the name, so here we are -

this one (and more, I hope!) will get bigger and turn red. Heat- and spice-wise, it's apparently fairly mild; I've read they're sometimes used in place of poblanos.
    I received the seeds I ordered for the fall/winter garden but it's still too hot to plant them, so I must be patient. Any number of garden chores await some cooling weather, which we'll have a taste of next week, according to the most recent forecast, and I look forward to digging and planting and transplanting, mostly various herbs and cacti. Of course when it cools the tomatoes will start setting fruit again - this one must have had its hormones triggered in some recent brief cool interval.

Bigger than a dime and smaller than a nickel, I see it as a sign of hope and faith that summer will soon be giving way to what passes for fall here in the desert southwest. I even changed my hair color in anticipation of the changing season; it's very, very red and I haven't decided whether to call it merlot or chianti, but I know autumn leaves come in this color.

Flower Power

Several days ago my friend Graciela came over and brought this gorgeous bunch of gladiolus (gladioli? gladioluses?).

The long stems loaded with buds promised many more amazing blossoms. But as the blossoms on the bottom began to fade, the weight of the buds bent the stems. So I stripped off the faded blooms and cut about a foot off the bottom of each stem, and here's what we have now, five days later, bent by the weight of their own beauty.

 Still show-stoppers, aren't they?
       Outdoors it's pretty dramatic in the back yard, where, as I think I mentioned before, we let the wild sunflowers grow because the goldfinches love them and we love watching the goldfinches. Some of them are 10 feet tall now (the sunflowers, not the goldfinches). Here's one with a bee in it. I wish we had more bees. Hand pollinating just got to be too much work for too little result, and of course the water bill was ridiculous for a summer vegetable garden that wasn't producing much, so we finally gave up on the squash, melons, and cucumbers. Now I can begin planning and daydreaming about the winter garden.

In addition to the wild sunflowers that are trying to take over a small part of our little world, we planted two varieties of Hopi sunflowers from seeds we got at Native Seed Search. The picture below is the first blossom we've gotten. It's maybe just a wee bit bigger than the wild ones, with narrower petals and more of them.

And that's the news from our little patch of the Sonoran desert, where the high temperature yesterday broke the previous record of 106, and where if we're really lucky and hold our mouths just right, we just may get some rain.

Flowers everywhere

Every morning Joe and I get off the bus on the south side of Speedway and walk north through the underpass that links the University of Arizona arts complex to the McClelland Building that houses the business department (our offices are in buildings nearby and far less grand), and for the last two weeks, when we come out of the underpass, we’re hit with a rush of intoxicating fragrance from the blooming acacia trees that makes me forget, at least for a moment, that I’m on my way to a long day of work—mostly rewarding, sometimes frustrating, but work nonetheless.  The high winds of the last couple of days have shorn the acacias of many of their blossoms, but this picture shows how they can touch even the plainest, most functional building (in this case a parking garage) with a loveliness made even more precious because it is ephemeral.

     Part of the east wall of that same garage is blanketed in yellow and white Tombstone roses, known outside Arizona as the Lady Banks rose.  They’re tough and hardy as well as lush and gorgeous, thriving in our heat and, unlike so many other plants that grow in the desert, devoid of thorns.  I haven’t planted any in our yard because I haven’t decided on the right spot yet, but I will.  Maybe not this year, though.  It’s getting late to plant roses.
     Some of you may remember the song from the ‘60s that contained the lines “Flowers in her hair / Flowers everywhere / I love the flower girl . . . “  Well, it’s like that in Tucson now.  The sour orange trees, common landscape plants here, are so heavy with blossoms you could almost get drunk on the fragrance, and total strangers stop to marvel together at the pure sensual pleasure of the experience. No, we don't actually call it that (at least not when we're speaking to strangers). It's usually something more like "Aren't the blossoms beautiful?" or "Doesn't that smell amazing?" But the effect on us is much more visceral and intense than such mundane language can express. 
     On our patio at home, the Meyer lemon I bought two years ago, that had one blossom when I bought it and produced none at all last year, is so loaded with buds and blooms I think I may have to prop up the branches.  It’s in a half wine barrel right by the kitchen door, and a rose geranium stands on the other side of that door, so there’s always something sweet-smelling as we go in or out.

     This year I got totally carried away planting nasturtiums.  We have the long vining type on a trellis at the back of one of the vegetable beds, several plants that have gotten much bigger than the package promised in one of the herb beds, pushing up against the chamomile at one end and the pineapple sage at the other, and a big round cluster of several plants of the Cherry Belle variety in the red quadrant of the Medicine Wheel garden.  When Deirdre and the boys were down during spring break, she and I taste-tested them (I love their peppery taste in salads, to look at and to eat) with the boys.  Isaiah, who’s going on eleven, is becoming a more adventurous eater and liked them, while Eli, who’s five, made a face and spit his out.

I remember seeing, in a magazine, chopped nasturtium petals in egg salad, very pretty and, I imagine, very tasty.  Think I’ll give that a try this weekend.