Category: Nature
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Lammas
Lammas – the solar cross-quarter holiday that marks the halfway point between the Summer Solstice and the Autumn Equinox – also marks the transition to early autumn, and the eight-week period that I named “Gathering the Sun” many years ago. We celebrated with a hike in the saguaro forest in the Rincon Mountains, listening to…
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Backyard Barrel Cactus
We’ve lived in this house for ten years this month. To celebrate the anniversary, I’ve been taking photos of the yard to compare with pictures that we took when we moved in. The mostly-barren gravelscape has become a beautiful desert garden. We have planted most things, such as desert oaks, agaves, soapberry, pomegranates, citrus trees,…
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Bloom Day: Pima Pineapple Cactus
Five days after the first significant summer rain…you can count on that to be Bloom Day for Coryphantha robustispina, the Pima Pineapple Cactus. For me, this event captures the bright, ephemeral essence of summer, with dozens of sunlike flowers peering out of the spines. The yellow flowers are slightly fluorescent and have a nearly metallic…
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Monsoons are Here!
Hot, humid, and hazy, with spectacular cloud buildups and (if we’re lucky that day), RAIN. It’s been humid for a couple of weeks, but the first rain only arrived last night, washing the dust off the trees and giving the seeds of monsoon wildflowers a wake-up call, though we won’t see them for awhile yet. …
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Turtle Shell Rattle
My New Moon project: dismantling a couple of older rattles to create a more useful and better-sounding one for mazewalking. I collected all the pieces in Kentucky about 15 years ago: a complete young box turtle shell (found on an abandoned railroad track), deer hooves (from a buck found dead in a wooded hollow at Midwinter –…
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Tiny Flowers
I’m working on a major revision of my Empire Mountains Flora webpage. The new version will have photos of all the plants. Images will pop up on the same page, allowing visitors to study the list as they look at the pictures. I expect to post the revised page within the next couple of weeks. The desert…
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