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Happy Pineapple Cactus Day!
Today was “bloom day” for the endangered Pima Pineapple Cactus. The plant pictured above is the largest of several that grow in the desert near my house (my cactus website has more photos). All plants usually bloom on the same day, three to five days after the first significant monsoon rain. This year, the past five days…
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The Ace of Disks for 28 Days
This pomegranate is a shattered copper vessel. The little green balls (one is hollow) are the glassy phosphate spheres that form in the ashes of funeral pyres (in the Tibetan Book of the Dead they are called “jewel-like relics”). Eventually, 28 pomegranates will form the series of daily cards for my moon oracle. That way,…
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Chubasco!
This is one of several mysterious pictographs in a rockhouse near the Gila River. The outer circle is pinkish-white clay or possibly chalk (caliche). The black circle is actually dark purple and is probably magnetite sand. The red circle is, of course, hematite (red ochre). The green is malachite (copper ore). Upon close examination, it appears that the…
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Clay, Iron, and Realgar
This pomegranate is painted with four kinds of green clay (plus black shale and a bit of charred bone). Green clays are sticky and always end up looking rather flat. But the colors are worth it! Two of these are glauconite (“terre verte”) from sedimentary rock, and two are bentonite and other clays from weathered…
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Two Eagles and Three Pomegranates
Today the air is so hot it burns, even in the shade, where it is 105. Vultures fly higher than usual on the rising thermals. Over the house, much higher than the vultures, we saw two eagles circling each other, heading south toward the clouds. A reminder of the two eagles that we saw on Sunday,…
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Full Moon: Eye of the Moth
An echo from yesterday’s post – the triple-segmented seedpods of Agave parviflora, the smallest of all the agaves. In the U.S., this variety is found only in the oak grasslands of the Atascosa/Pajarito mountains. We explored a dirt road to the border today and saw several of them. The miniature seedpods are the size of…
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A Line Between Worlds
Yesterday we went for a drive along the U.S. – Mexico border south of the Huachuca Mountains – a journey through oak grassland that glows like a bowl of light, ending at cliffs and a spring where we hunted for ferns and watched butterflies. Here, the border is a steel wire no thicker than the…
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Summer Solstice
Midsummer, 105 degrees! The coralbeans shown above are blooming now – I took the photos on Sunday. The toxic seeds are typically bright red but sometimes they fade, like the ones in the photo. In the Mexican thorn forest, Erythrina flabelliformis is a tree, with wood that is strong enough to use for tool handles. Here it…
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