The Burrow

The big, beautiful sunflower was the victim of monsoon winds and rain.   Even the tiny bugs and birds are uninterested in anything much any more. But another giant beauty, a little different but stunning all the same, joined us from another container. The bees are very interested in this one. He's carrying a plug of pollen in his tiny little feet/pincers//fingers/who knows.   I was so taken with the whole operation I forgot to take his picture until he was just about out of focus. You can really see the Fibonacci spirals in this one.

G'ma used to say that the only way to grow zinnias without them getting moldy was not to plant zinnias at all.  They must be watered from the bottom, keeping the leaves dry. Even then, it's touch and go whether they survive. It's another story here in Tucson.  Our dry heat and the winds stirring up the monsoon seem to have made mine impervious to rot. Just take a look:                                                        The blooms are prolific.   They also change color as they age.  See for yourself:                                                                     The deeper color fades as the blos...

Drove home in the dark, though tonight it was punctuated by bolts of lightning.  This is not the lightning of Long Island or Chicago or Marin.  These are vertical, startlingly bright, tremendously long, bolts of light that illuminate the mountains and make midnight feel like late afternoon.  Sometimes there are more than one at a time, and the whole sky turns a milky white. I would rather have been a passenger than the one responsible for staying calm as the night explodes. Hadn't remembered to leave a light on and groped to find the alarm, whose bright green clock wasn't enough to encourage a speedy transit of the 5 steps from the door.  I dropped my hospital purse and the bright pink cooler on the kitchen counter and turned to the sink to wash my hands. I looked up as I replaced the detritus of the day with aloe and grapefruit and saw this Last month,  Auntie M and Mr. T sent me a fruit basket filled with lots of multi-colored paper, some unfortuna...

We are preparing to have the outside of our house painted.  Wind and sun and heat and time have eroded the stucco and peeled the paint.  It's time. There are all kinds of new products - including Rhino Shield which wanted nearly $50,000 to seal our home with a 25 year warranty against anything looking less than perfect.  In 25 years we'll be midway through our 90's, which makes this a very hopeful purchase. Our previous painting company was purchased by a larger painting company, after extensive review of their personnel and practices.  We liked knowing that the service we valued in the past was appreciated by this new ownership. We also liked the price and the 10 year warranty; celebrating my 81st birthday doesn't seem that far fetched.   There is a lengthy list of instructions, including RELAX, midway down the page.  Today, though, I did not relax,  Instead, I did what I could to comply with the requirement that all vegetation must be 2' away fr...

Today was a balmy, ninety-something cloudless Tucson morning, with a high breeze that didn't do much to cool things off, but which moved the air just enough.  TBG was able to drive himself to PT.  For the first time in weeks I was alone in my house.   No one would notice what I was doing.  I could read.  I could turn the volume on the music up way too loud.  I could play Candy Crush Soda. I chose to garden. Yesterday, my clippers and I went to work on the dead edges of the hanging basket and the big containers.  I was ruthless.  I ripped out and cut back and removed.  I reorganized and replanted.   The garden center 's newsletter told me to give my roses a haircut, so I did.  LiLou , our grand-pig, did a fine job of trimming their branches on her last visit; there wasn't much left for me to do.   I watered in the changes before going inside to be sure TBG wasn't writhing in agony.    But today I had no ...

Scarlet's never had her own garden before; she's alert to every nibble and discoloration in her small but passionately tended space.  She has a gardener she trusts, but he has his own ideas about what to cut and how to cut it.  She uses me as a sounding board - am I right to insist on this? Late Summer in the desert has brought the moths.  More moths than anyone ever remembers seeing.  Not butterflies, with colorful wings and delicate markings.  These are swarms of brown winged insects, clustering around your face and arms, swirling about in my courtyard as I type to you.  Twenty or thirty of them are touring my front yard right now, some dipping down to investigate 2 feet off the ground, others circling the rosemary, looking for I don't know what. There are some tiny yellow ones who have paired up this morning, dancing between the crepe myrtle bush and the river rocks.  Google tells me that moths are drab colored  and encourages me to look at the...

People buy amaryllis bulbs in WallyWorld, at the drug store, at Michaels, and at garden centers. They buy these bulbs from late October through the end of the year.  Sometimes they come in pretty pots.  The maintenance to display ratio is overbalanced toward beauty. The thing is, they are bought as a Christmas flower.  The red blooms and bright green stems complement the holiday decor.  In April, between Easter and Mother's Day, my tchotchkes tend toward the pastels.   Apparently, this bulb never got the memo. The first year, it bloomed in January.  Over time, its internal clock has reset itself, relentlessly moving forward through the year.  The thick leaves have been anchoring the giant pot just outside our front door, surrounded by pink and white vinca and the occasional gladiola, for quite a while.   The flowers opened this weekend.  I broke off the stalk and brought them inside.   We just got home. I have no particula...

This is  what I saw when I opened the blinds this morning. The flowers are fabulous up close, too. The yard guys were here and used their youth and strength to dig holes for my new roses. They look much better now that they are out of their black plastic pots.   This beauty shed her protective leaf soon after Matt put her in the ground. And then, there are the pots.  My annuals turn out to be perennials and surprise me every year.  This pot in this spot was an unhappy home for a rose bush and a variety of refugee plants from other parts of the garden.  But the globe amaranth ( Gomphrena Fireworks) comes back year after year after a drastic haircut in the fall, and the snapdragons reseed and flourish, creating beauty with no effort on my part.   I was entranced by these pansies in the nursery  and brought a bunch of them home. It took them a month or so to settle in, but the hot days and cool nights have put a smile on their faces.  Faces, you...

Little Cuter's weather has been Midwestern winter - sunny when it's not snowing, temperatures hovering just above zero,  the wind blowing ice crystals sharply into her face, slushy roads causing accidents all over the place. Here in Tucson it's a different story entirely.  This is what I saw from my desk this weekend.   Wishing I had a true telephoto lens, I watched the tiny yellow and black finches and the red breasted little brown things devouring the rosemary hedge. The dried crepe myrtle buds were another stop on their buffet.  It takes a lot of energy to migrate, and the bees from the saguaro seemed willing to share the bounty.   The cardinals perching on top of the saguaro surveyed the scene, swooping down to scare off the tinier birds every once in a while, just to remind everybody who was in charge.  It was a science filmstrip from 3rd grade come alive.  I was mesmerized as I followed all 46 minutes of a Pilates on Vimeo  barre ...

Mrs. E invited me into her 5th grade's Wednesday Zoom meeting.  I had more than a week to prepare.  I have come to a conclusion:  Teaching is not for the faint of heart. Grandma got into her coat of many colors, organized her notes and her demonstration items, and then I realized that my computer was on an endless loop of rebooting itself and Grandma was gone and I was in a panic.  With two minutes to spare, I connected via the iPad mini perched atop a box (that was happily out of place) and leaning against my water bottle (I was thirsty but thwarted). I found the gallery view (with a little bit of encouragement) and then there they were, bigger but still the same.  Their faces filled my heart.  I could feel it expanding in my chest. But there was no time to dwell on the wonderfulness of it all, because suddenly the introductions and instructions and reminders were over and it was time to talk about xylem and phloem. They are two of the strangest words to s...

I'd say we were oversubscribed, but I was thrilled with the turnout. I went in with a flexible lesson plan in mind; forty some kindergarteners sent that flying. There was no way they were going to make name tags; they wanted to garden.  So, I regrouped. I went over the rules : Be Kind  (Obviously.) No Shoes on the Raised Beds. (Do you want people walking on your bed with their shoes?)  No climbing on or over the fence.  (Grandma will get in trouble if you do that, and I don't want trouble). Then I set them to weeding the entire garden area.  Their enthusiasm was delicious, but there were so many of them that taking pictures was impossible.  I was the only grown up, and I had to admire the collections of tiny leaves and small stones and sticks presented to me by many many many proud, little hands.   The bigger kids came in the next wave.  There were just as many of them, and they were bigger. They took up more space, a...

Life in the desert isn't easy for seedlings.  The sun is unrelenting.  The rain is sporadic and uneven, drowning you one day and starving you for months afterwards.  The ground is hard packed and dense; roots have a tough time finding their way through the spaces.  There aren't a lot of nutrients in what passes for soil here; to me, it always looks like dirt. If the drip system is humming along smoothly, the plants I planted and irrigated do just fine.  If the drip system acts up, strange things begin to happen.  Established plants become leggy.  Blooms are stunted.  Leaves become smaller and more fragile.  Everything looks droopy. I asked Scarlett's Irrigation Guru for an estimate on upgrading my system; $3500 is more than I'm interested in spending right now.  So I've been fine tuning it myself, considering which tubes need larger emitters, which can be capped off, which need to be extended further out as the plant's canopy gets wi...

Because the news is too perverse. Because the heat is here and we're sweltering. Because everyone who visits comments on this container. Because I appreciate the fact that you spend a little bit of time every once in a while with me. Because I planted it and tended it and I'm proud. Happy Wednesday!

Some consideration was given to creating a Mothers Day post. Then, this happened: The amaryllis which had languished in the potting shed was springing to life before my very eyes. After several months of sporadic attention in the Pot Before You Are Finished For Good, the Christmas-time flower is going to be just a little late for Mothers Day. I could not ignore its valiant efforts to please, so I moved the PBYAFFG to the courtyard,  where, I saw these: Overnight, these big, fleshy leaves had produced the perfect shade of lavender on straight and sturdy stalks.  Again, I couldn't ignore the magnificence; off to the garden center I went. I transplanted unhappy osteospermum and added some gonfreda and deadheaded and amended and left some fun for tomorrow.  This gladiola began peeking out on Saturday; this was as far as she got by Sunday evening.  I'm going to entice the rest of her friends out tomorrow,  as I end my planting for the seas...

I went outside, after being inside all day. I saw this  and this  and this. I leaned in to the gladiolus, because the colors could not be ignored. I admired the new hibiscus . I moved from container to container,  and then I was done. This is all that's filling my brain right now, and that's why I can't write (any more) today.

Miss Vicki organized a trip to Desert Survivors last week.  The Happy Ladies Club Gardening Group is a fluid bunch; those who were regulars have disappeared and new members have joined and I've been absent for much too long.  I forgot how inspiring it is to be surrounded by others who share a passion; the plants looked much different after hearing how they grew in this one's front yard, in that one's courtyard, in a pot by another's poolside. After three hours of garden gossip, I was energized.... and so was my credit card.  Shopping for plants is the gardener's joy and abyss... there is really no reason to stop, it seems, since everything looks so luscious.  I was good - I bought only this leopard succulent... whose name escapes me.   But, I'm getting ahead of the story.   Desert Survivors is a human service organization with a botanic twist. Set on 3.8 acres at the base of A Mountain it carries 550 species of native plants. T...