I get these flowers for most of the year. It seems that the venerable little Bishop Cap cactus keeps on producing these after nearly seventeen years since we adopted it in a three-inch pot just before we got married.
The cactus had been transplanted three times and has lived with us in both California and Arizona and just keeps on giving us flowers. Click on the image to enlarge.
Our travels took us to Surprise, AZ today to do a little shopping and a doctor’s follow-up appointment. The landscape in the parking lot of the doctor had a succulent (a type of agave, we’ve been told) in bloom. Near the bottom of the photo in the center is a tiny hummingbird gathering nectar from the flowers. Click on the image to enlarge.
Ed – Thanks Crotalus for the correction on the flower type.
Spring and summer will give me plenty of subject material for my flower photos. I took this picture today of a neighbor’s cholla cactus. We also have cholla blooming on the upper lot, but it’s a bit of a climb to get up there with my camera. We have some cholla on the lower lot too, but they flower later in the summer. Click on the image to enlarge.
This is a hedgehog cactus clump located up near the north property line behind our house. This is the largest of several in that area and it is currently flowering as you can see from the image Damsel took a couple of days ago. Click on the image to enlarge.
This cactus and the others in the area are not visible from the lower level of the lot where the house is located and can only be seen after a moderately difficult climb. There are also lots of trees, cholla, creosote and other shrubs and cacti that make access difficult but not impossible.
We would like to move one or more of the hedgehogs to the lower lot, so we did some research on moving native cacti. Arizona law protects native cacti from randomly being removed and transplanted, but it allows us to remove or transplant on our own property without going through the process of getting permission to do so.
The cactus in the image will be too large for us to manage digging it up and moving it, but there is a smaller clump near the property line just behind the palo verde whose base can be seen in the upper center of the image. That cactus is similar in size to this hedgehog cactus which has been properly tagged per state permit process. We plan to move it sometime in June when conditions are said to be optimum for transplanting cacti in Arizona.
The flowers in the slideshow above are all growing on or around our property. The show starts with one of our bright pink beavertail cactus flowers (we have so many now) and is followed by some unidentified wildflowers, creosote, sage flowers, some other unidentified wildflowers, a lemon blossom, a wild desert marigold and yet some other unknown pink wildflowers. Click on the images to advance the slideshow.
This beavertail transplant sure is going crazy in its new place in the rock and cactus garden. I suspect that it benefits from some nearby citrus trees irrigation runoff. It is one of several we transplanted a couple of years ago from the unimproved part of the lot and is, by far, the most prolific in terms of paddle and flower production. Click on the image to enlarge.
Wildflowers are popping up all over the desert according to what we see locally and read in Arizona Highways. We see them growing along the roads, in the hills and in some very unusual places, like this poppy in a block wall down the road from our little desert cottage. Nature perseveres in natural and unnatural places. Click on the image to enlarge.
We may take a drive one of these days to where the flowers are known to grow in abundance in order to get a wildflower photo-op. Stay tuned.
