Yard update after the storms

After all of our monsoon rain the past month, I finally got out in the yard to photograph some of the colorful blooms. This purple flowering shrub with grey-green leaves is the Texas Ranger, which only blooms when it gets just the right amount of moisture and heat. Mine burst into bloom yesterday! The bees love them.

This is the Baja Fairy Duster, and the rain brought out a lot of its pretty red "dusters." Hummingbirds love them.

 

This monster plant in my west-facing courtyard is called a Lady Slipper because the red flowers are supposed to look like slippers, but I don't see that. It's one of the few plants hardy enough for my courtyard that bakes in the summer sun. This is another one that hummingbirds love. I call it a monster plant because its sap can cause severe rashes if you get it on your skin.

 

These red spiky flowers are on my potted Firecracker plant, which is the only potted plant of the many I've tried that has survived the summer in the hot courtyard. But I do have to water it twice a day all summer.

The prickly pear cactus that reaches my roof is bursting with immature fruit since we got the heavy rains! They seem to have appeared almost overnight.

And my ocotillo, above, which had looked like a clutch of grey thorny sticks, suddenly greened up a few storms ago. It's a very hardy Sonoran Desert native that requires no water from me, and in the spring it sprouts red flowers on its tips.

My double-stalked yucca is doing great, but the tender succulent below succumbed to the intense heat when it climbed above 110 for a stretch. I think it baked in its pot, even though it was shaded most of the day. I also might have watered it too much trying to cool it off. And it was doing so well! Lesson learned. After four years here in the desert, I still have much to learn about growing plants.

We had another doozy of a storm yesterday, with pounding horizontal rain that came in under my back door, nonstop thunder and lightning, and flooding streets that required lots of rescues of drivers whose cars got stuck in the high water. And we're looking at more rain for the next week.

Have a colorful day