Show us your flowers!

 From my daughter in Spokane, eastern WA

I asked my far-flung family to send pictures of flowers this week from their parts of the country for a colorful post, so here they are! I hope you enjoy the little tour.

The first two are from my daughter's yard in Spokane. The house is over 100 years old, and the flowers that came with it are old-fashioned roses and peonies.

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My daughter-in-law in Madison, WI

Farmers market flowers from my son.

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My sister in Pt. Hadlock, western WA

Wild rose

Washington, with its long hours of spring and summer daylight and wet spring, is lush with flowers. I really miss them since moving here.

Dahlia

Poppies

Poppy

Not sure what this is

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My brother in Solana Beach, CA,

near San Diego

My brother planted three colors of hibiscus ...

... and a desert rose, among other flowers.

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My sister visiting Minneapolis, MN

Lots of shade plants on neighborhood walks ...

... a front yard wildflower garden to attract bees ...

... and irises.

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Dave in Gig Harbor, western WA

Wild irises growing by a spring that his cats like to drink from.

My sister in western Washington just posted some flowers on Facebook under the heading of Celebrating Spring. Spring? I've been sweating out summer for months! Here's next week's Tucson forecast:

Me, in Hell

(June in Tucson, AZ)

Meanwhile, this is the year I finally gave up trying to keep flowers alive in the pot by my front door. It faces straight west into the hellish afternoon sun, and the shape of the courtyard turns it into an oven. So this week I pulled out the third coral fountain (a "hardy" plant that supposedly thrives in our sun) that died in that pot and replanted it with a metal Kokopelli stake and rocks. Take that, Arizona!

I also dressed the front door knob with a sleeve so I won't burn my hands anymore on it when the sun moves to that side of the house. My neighbor told me about them. Everyone who buys a house here should be given one by their real estate agent, along with a car windshield shade.

Have a colorful day

I can see clearly now ...

 

I finally admitted defeat and hired someone to clean my glass shower enclosure. This is how it looks now, above, and before, below. In my defense, I squeegeed (but not enough), and I had a white shower curtain hanging over the glass so I didn't realize how bad it was getting. 

It was really awful. I tried spraying with vinegar and all kinds of non-toxic mixtures, but nothing worked.

So I hired The Handy Family, a wonderful family (whose last name is not Handy), and they got it sparkling in no time! I had them pose behind the glass before they left. They also got my bathroom fixtures clean from hard water buildup and totally transformed my shower floor.

I'm too embarrassed to show you the before picture of the shower floor, but the after picture is below. Again, I scrubbed and rubbed with non-toxic cleaners and the Magic Eraser, but nothing worked. After they finished it was amazing! They used a machine to scrub it clean then recolored and sealed the grout and put four coats of a sealer on the whole floor to make future cleaning a breeze.

Here's what they used on the glass, rubbing it with very fine steel wool. But I won't have to use this if I just squeegee after EVERY shower. 

And this is what I can use to keep the shower clean. They said to spray it on the floor and walls about once a month, walk away while it works, and then just rinse with water. No more scrubbing. If it was in my budget I'd have them clean the whole house!

Thanks, Leana and Steven!

Have a colorful day

The Green Gentians bloomed!

 

The Green Gentians on Mt. Lemmon are blooming! This only happens once in their life, and not until they have existed for decades as a ground-level rosette of leaves. 

Debbie and I went back up yesterday and this time they were opening! Last week when we went up they were still tight buds. Here's that post: stalking-great-green-gentian.html

They can get tall -- and a lot of them were taller than us. We found them on Turkey Run Trail and another trail whose name I forget. I just followed Debbie, who knew where to look.

The flowers are arranged in rings along the stalk, like this. They aren't nearly as dramatic as the Queen of the Night in my last post, but it did feel magical to find them in the forest. I half expected to see little fairies flitting about them!

Here are some more facts about them:

* Their official name is Frasera speciosa, but they are also called the Monument Plant because of how tall their stalk can get.

* The flowers are typically about one to two inches across and characterized by their freckled, four-petaled structure.

* They produce an average of 600 flowers per stalk!

* Each stalk can yield about 66,000 seeds.

* Here's an interesting link from the University of Colorado: green-gentians-live-decades-only-flower-once

There was a lot of other green on the mountain, and it was a cool respite from the temps down in Tucson that hit 103 yesterday. It's about 20 degrees cooler on Mt. Lemmon, where we were at over 8,000 feet elevation.

This is the green view from where we had lunch on the patio at the Iron Door. It's a ski resort in the winter.

After lunch we went on two short walks on some other trails before heading back down to the desert and scuttling into the air conditioning.

Have a colorful day

The Queen of the Night appears

 

I was lucky enough to see the elusive Queen of the Night cactus bloom last night! Tohono Chul gardens shot out a notice to members yesterday afternoon that the big moment would arrive in a few hours, based on daily observations by their garden manager. The park opened from 7-11 PM so we could marvel at this magical flower, which only blooms for one night of the year. They bloom en masse, although no one knows exactly how they signal each other.

The rest of the year they look like skinny grey sticks. Since the cactus cannot self-pollinate, the plants must bloom on the same evening to ensure pollination. The more blooms that are open, the greater the chances of pollination, usually by hawk moths.

They're in the far-flung scrubby desert on the edge of the park, so we were advised to bring flashlights to follow the gravel paths. Each plant that was set to bloom was lighted so we could find them, but as soon as the park closed the lights would go off so that moths could get down to their business of pollination.

The garden manager, with the rakish name of Jack Dash, gave an entertaining talk before we set out. He said he checks the plants every morning around this time of year, and when their buds go from hard to soft he knows they're ready to bloom. Then the park scrambles to get volunteers to help out and to send out notices to its members and the media for the big night. Thousands show up.

The white blooms are just exquisite and about as big as the palm of a hand. Jack said they give off a melon scent to attract the moths, although I couldn't smell it. They bloom around the same time as the Sacred Datura, which has much the same scent, so Dash speculated that this helps pull in more moths to pollinate both plants. After that one-night frenzy, the flowers wither soon after sunrise.

Tohono Chul, a non-profit botanical garden and nature preserve in Tucson, has the largest private collection of Peniocereus greggi, the Night Blooming Cereus, in the world. Some were planted by the staff and others grow naturally on the grounds. Native to Southwestern North America, they only reveal their spectacular flower in the heat of the early Tucson summer. And this past week it's reached 100 degrees here!

The queen also appears in this huge mural at Tohono Chul. That's me for size reference. The mural, "Twilight Sonoran" by  Ignacio Garcia, was just dedicated this year. Its sign says: 

"Twilight Sonoran is a mural that captures the breathtaking magic of the Sonoran Desert after dark -- through the eyes of its creatures. This mural is an invitation to step into an animal's perspective of the desert night, where late-summer monsoons roll across the horizon, stars shimmer in silence, and life glows softly beneath a moonlit sky. It explores the rarely seen beauty of the desert's nocturnal ecosystem. Twilight Sonoran is a visual poem in blue, glowing with quiet desert life, meant to calm, inspire, and connect -- a feeling that lingers like starlight." 

Queen of the Desert flowers, saguaro cacti, a scorpion and lizard appear on the mural.

The night stroll did feel magical, with Venus and Jupiter above and saguaro cacti silhouetted against the deep blue sky. (Thanks to my friend Del for telling me which planets they are. I didn't have a clue.)

An agave stalk with its blooms glowed alongside globes that softly changed colors. It was a special experience and the first time I made it since I moved here six years ago.

Have a peaceful night

Stalking the Great Green Gentian

Debbie beside a Green Gentian stalk

My friend Debbie got a hot tip from another hiker when she was up on Mt. Lemmon the other week: The Green Gentians were waking up and sprouting tall stalks that would soon flower for the only time in their 20-80-year life, then they would die. It's a BIG deal! So she took Jan and me up the mountain yesterday to "stalk" them.

This is what they look like for decades, and we saw plenty in this phase. But the flowering is a rare event.

We didn't find any blooms yet, but this is an image I found online. The flowers are one to two inches across.

We found plenty of stalks, which can get up to 10 feet tall. It's also known as the monument plant because of this. They're native to mountainous areas of the Western United States, including Mt. Lemmon just outside of Tucson.

We found all of these in one little area, so it will be spectacular when they all bloom.

Then we hugged some big trees because we never get to do this down in the desert! It was so nice and cool up there at 8,000 feet, about 65 degrees and breezy so it felt more like 55.

Then we did what you traditionally do on Mt. Lemmon, which is heading to the Iron Door for lunch and your own little pie. Jan's loaded potato was monumental!

I had chicken quesadillas that I ate for lunch and later dinner, followed by a cinnamon-flecked warm apple pie with crumble topping. 

Jan got peach blueberry (below) and Debbie had mountain berry with a mountain of whipped cream on top. It was a good day.

Have a colorful day