This brightly colored flower grows on three shrubs in our courtyard. The shrub, red bird of paradise, a.k.a. pride of Barbados, will produce these pretty flowers all summer long. Come November, we will prune these back to just a foot or so while they go dormant until next spring when they will bounce back with twice as many flowers.
Anyone who has read our blog for a while will know that these flowers are my favorites. Click on the image to enlarge.
We weren’t sure about the name of this cactus, so we asked the garden shop that sold it to us. They said it’s an Argentine Giant Cactus. I looked it up on-line and found the Latin name, Echinopsis candicans. Yesterday, it produced another beautiful white flower. We already had three other flowers earlier in June. Click on the image to enlarge.
We missed posting yesterday due to out-of-town visitors.
P.S. Happy Birthday to Cap’n Bob.
A single flower opened on this little cactus last week. Today, it has five beautiful pink flowers. Click on the image to enlarge.
I found this reference to the little cacti that dot the hill behind our house at BirdandHike.com:
Common Fishhook Cactus (Mammillaria tetrancistra) is a small, mound-shaped cactus with short, thin white spines that nearly cover the plant plus longer, darker, fish-hook shaped spines that stand out from the body of the plant. In early summer, red to lavender flowers emerge from the side of the stem that are nearly as large as the entire plant.
I believe this is the last of the summer saguaro flowers on our giant cactus. We were very fortunate to have had so many flowers after the cactus crew transplanted our beautiful saguaro in May. Click on the image to enlarge.
When we were getting our landscape irrigation installed, the crew dug up a small fishhook barrel cactus. One of the guys asked if I wanted to plant it somewhere else, so I put it into a six inch pot to allow it to grow enough for transplanting into the cactus garden. Unexpectedly, today the tiny fishhook has this beautiful pink flower. Click on the image to enlarge.
This flower is only about a half inch tall and a little less than that wide. It’s on one of the cacti we recently brought from California. Since the cactus has been in Arizona, it grew a new lobe and then this flower appeared on the new lobe. Click on the image to enlarge.
We did our grocery shopping for the Fourth of July weekend yesterday. As I passed the flower concession in the supermarket, I put some nice red Gerbera daisies in the cart. This one is in the little bathroom. You can see part of my beautiful framed mirror in the out-of-focus background. Click on the image to enlarge.
