Home & Garden

Even though some of the Pride of Barbados (a.k.a. Red Bird of Paradise) shrubs elsewhere in town have had flowers for a while, the first week in June seems to trigger my three shrubs in the courtyard to open their flowers. It was this week a year ago that my first Red Bird flower opened.

Some places, like the Caribbean islands, enjoy this shrub all year long, but since we have frosts, the shrubs go dormant after summer and fall. We are glad to have them when they have flowers like the one above.

From Wikipedia:

[Caesalpinia pulcherrima] is a shrub growing to 3 m tall. In climates with little to no frosts, this plant will grow larger and is semi-evergreen. Grown in climates with light to moderate freezing, plant will die back to the ground depending on cold, but will re-bound in mid to late spring. This species is more sensitive to cold than others. The leaves are bipinnate, 20–40 cm long, bearing 3-10 pairs of pinnae, each with 6-10 pairs of leaflets 15–25 mm long and 10–15 mm broad. The flowers are borne in racemes up to 20 cm long, each flower with five yellow, orange or red petals. The fruit is a pod 6–12 cm long.

The medium large saguaro in the front of the garage by the driveway has been producing flowers for over a week now. Only yesterday we were finally able to take the telephoto lens and get a close up of a flower not pointing straight up so we can see the inside of it. The arms of the cactus extend to twelve feet or so above the ground making it difficult to get a straight-on photo of the flowers.

We are noticing a few new buds that are more on the sides of some of the arms that might allow us to get a better image of the flowers when they open. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, click on the image to enlarge.

We purchased this potted cactus recently with the intent to eventually put it in the cactus garden. In the meantime, its spring flowers have been opening, the most recent of which is pictured above. I am not sure of the name of this variety, but it sure has beautiful hot pink flowers. Click on the image to enlarge.

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.