Hey, what’s all this green stuff?
Pat and I just spent this past weekend in Arizona. The original plan was to sell a boat, but that deal fell through, so essentially we ended up making a very expensive green chile delivery to Gerald.
It's been rainy in Arizona lately. According to Gerald's roommate/landlord, the Phoenix area has, in the first two months of this year, received about as much precipitation as it usually gets in about three years. As a result, the desert is looking … well … not so desert-like.
In Albuquerque, there's a company that used to sell and install sprinkler systems. Now, it still does sprinklers, but it also does artificial lawns that don't need sprinklers to stay green, and other landscape components. Until recently, it had a patch of artificial lawn out front, with a saguaro cactus (presumably also artificial, but very real-looking) in the middle of it. Every time I went past it, I thought, a saguaro surrounded by green grass … that's so … so … wrong.
Well, maybe it isn't, as demonstrated by these shots taken along the Carefree Highway near Lake Pleasant.
Labels: boats, desert, observations, pretty pictures, sailing, tadpole, travel
posted by Carol Anne | 10:23 PM
4 Comments:
I love saguaros. I used to live in El Paso during a stint in the army and while there are none there, I would get to see them on visits to my uncle in Phoenix. We have a plant that grows in the sandy roadsides near where we live that vaguely reminds me of saguaro.It is called Common Mullein, came from Europe if I recall. They get about six feet tall and usually there will be either just one or maybe two together.
Interesting bit of trivia I ran across while looking up Gordon Lightfoot song lyrics ... apparently, Lake Pleasant used to be called Lake Saguaro.
Yes, we have mulleins at Five O'Clock Somewhere. The folklore says that how tall they get during the summer is how deep the snow will be the following winter. It doesn't always work that way, but sometimes it does.
I wonder if all that rain is bad for the saguaros?
I remember killing a little cactus I had when I was a kid because I insisted on watering it.
Thomas Friedman did a column earlier this year in which he suggested that the phrase "global warming" be changed to "global weirding". I thought that was a good idea.
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