Spring                                                  Hare Moon
Each time I’ve come to the southwest the plants have fascinated me.  This arid desert environment has pushed distinct plant adaptations.

After looking carefully at all the varieties of cactus in the area around the Residence Inn I noticed that they all have deep furrow in what would be a temperate latitude plant’s stalk. Instead of a thin, wide flappy leaf they have a photosynthetic surface that is long and thick, one that covers the entire plant itself, yet with small, vertical canyons.

The spines, too, are ubiquitous. I imagine these plants cannot afford to lose any water storage capacity so they defend it with vigor.  Shrubby plants or trees have small, thicker leaves, too, often in racemes.  Nothing is big.  Compactness, too, is a survival strategy.

These plants seem like small vegetative castles, redoubts of photosynthesis scattered apart from each other, yet important enough in their own right to deserve a strong defense.

As a horticulturist, I wonder about the differences between healthier specimens and less vigorous ones.  What kind of care do cacti, for example, need in this kind of environment?  A bank a block from here has two splendid, healthy saguaro’s, upright and with vibrant green forms where many of the cacti here at the Inn are wobbly and have some discoloration.

This type of growing environment does not appeal to me.  Its possibilities are too few and the demands of another, more temperate form of agriculture would require far too much water.  That’s not to say that the result here is displeasing, far from it.  The plants and the landscape have a beauty created by simplification, of forms in their essence.

There are, too, pages devoted to Arizona’s poisonous insects, spiders, snakes and lizards.  Not sure about this but I imagine the paucity of resources in the desert make those creatures that survive here necessarily strong.  Evolution’s selections mirror the difficulty of life, its preciousness here.

It’s interesting to read the pages about these creatures because they’re written in a cautionary tone that tries, too, to not make them sound all that serious.  This is, after all, a tourist economy.

The timing of the workshops will make touristing difficult for me, but I plan either tomorrow or the next day to get up early and drive out to the eastern chunk of the Saguaro National Park.  I also want to get up into the Catalina Mountains, but this cold has sapped a lot of my energy.

On the other hand Kate wrote that it was 3 in Andover this morning.  Let me see.  Hmm.  86.  Again.