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!
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
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