Dreams, Moments, Travels
Local date palms are hanging heavy with large clusters of dates fruiting high above our heads. I assume the birds nab these sweets before they ever make contact with the ground as one moment the dates are there, next they have disappeared, and I haven’t walked through a sticky mess of rotting fruit. Maybe someone out there can tell me what happens to the dates growing around the city of Phoenix, Arizona, that are obviously not being harvested?
Macro shot of the Mexican Bird of Paradise. This perennial is found throughout the Phoenix area as it flowers most of the year and does great with hot and dry conditions. The botanical name is Caesalpinia Mexicana. Bees like the flowers, and the seeds are poisonous. Not very interesting stuff to say about this plant; besides that, it is nice to look at.
I visited my mother, grandfather, and great-aunt this afternoon. The backyard has a pond where a half dozen fish share the green, murky water with these lilies. This summer, a couple of dozen bees, some wasps, and dragonflies are also calling the pond home.
Taking a moment today after working too hard, I look up through the leaves of a mesquite tree to see that the pods are opening and dumping their fruit. The mesquite is one of the coolest trees in Arizona. With roots that go as deep as 60 feet, there is often more wood below ground than above. Used for cooking, mesquite can lend great flavor to any cookout; just check out Cattle Exchange Restaurant in Canadian, Texas, for proof of that. The fruit from the pod is used by the Apache and is ground into flour or fermented to make an intoxicating drink. The gum from the tree can be eaten as candy or used as cement to repair pottery. Who knew?
Jutta and I visited the Desert Botanical Garden today in Phoenix, Arizona. At only 9:00 a.m., the temperature was already over 90, and the Garden was not overwhelmed with visitors. The Garden was far more beautiful than I imagined for this time of year. Many cacti are in bloom right now, including an incredibly large flower blooming on the Echinopsis Cactus.
The photo above, though, is from the Barrel Cactus, whose bloom had this fierce-looking monster of a bug staring me down before it leaped 20 feet or more and attacked my mother-in-law with savage brutality, leaving her wrinkled and a bit stooped over.
Through the carnage, my mother-in-law still enjoyed the dangers the Botanical Garden had to offer; tomorrow, I’ll post information regarding her near-fatal encounter with “THORNS”!
Attention: all of the photos in this post were updated in 2023, while only the image with a bug was in the original post. The text above this is the original that was written back in 2005 while this part of the post is part of the 2023 update.
I’ve added the extra images to better represent the day.
And other than that, have nothing else to add to the memories of that day.
Spring is fading fast giving way to summer, but as the brief green of spring turns brown, the cactus continue their springtime show with a wonderful display of colors as they make their annual bloom.