This is the time of year that this little yellow palo verde tree on the road out front gets its tiny flowers (see inset). The bees love to browse these and you can hear them buzzing during the day when passing by the tree.
This little tree is one that was already growing here when we had the house built. There was a cat’s paw right next to the tree originally, but we had the landscapers remove it since it was encroaching and causing the little tree to lean over. Since that time, we have been pruning the tree to encourage it to fill out on the side where the other tree was.
This tree will probably continue to be in bloom until late May when the heat starts to come back to our desert. Click on the image to enlarge.
Does it have any aroma?
Damsel asked me to answer the question, drjim. As far as we can tell, neither of the two varieties of palo verde (yellow, blue) have any aroma. The yellow, shown above, also has some formidable spiked ends on its branches which prohibit close nasal inspection. 😆
OH, yeah….don’t need any impromptu nasal surgery just because I asked!
Not knowing much about desert flora, I always ask. Some of the flowers are so pretty that it seems a shame they might not have a fragrance.
But then they live in a pretty hostile environment, so maybe they were just too busy trying to get by, so they never bothered with it.
Most of the desert flowers have brilliant colors but no noticeable fragrance except for Cereus and other night-blooming varieties. Our Argentine Giant had a flower while we were gone, so we missed its delicate perfume.
Maybe our Queen-of-the night will open this July with more aroma. We’ll see . . .