Home & Garden

The cactus buds that I posted about last week are fully open today and they are a very hot pink, indeed. The photos at the top and above left were taken just after noon while the last panel was taken this evening as the flowers have begun to close. We know that cactus flowers don’t last long, so we enjoy them while they’re here. Click on any the images to enlarge to full size.

Better get used to seeing beautiful cactus flowers, because it is the season for it. This is a flower that opened today o the Lawyer’s Tongue Cactus on the west side of our yard along the fence. We planted this cactus from a fallen pad we found in a park in town, and it has done extremely well since it was in a pot in the patio to (now) on the west side in the ground.

I counted over fifty flower buds on this cactus – there were only nine last year – and I expect to have most of them open and to get them imaged in the camera. Click on the image to enlarge.

Here we are with another “too many to count” flower eruption on my Bishop’s Cap Cactus. Bob and I bought this cactus when it was in a three-inch pot at a cactus nursery in Chandler, AZ, just before we got married. That would be about eighteen years ago, by my reckoning.

This cactus has always done well since we first put it in the patio in our California home. It is now here in the Arizona Courtyard and must (it seems) produce a hundred flowers each year, way more than it ever did on California.

I did not bother to count the number of this opening, but I can assure you that it is one of the larger flower counts in recent history of the Bishop’s blooms. Click on the image to enlarge.

Last week, we went shopping for some shrubbery to replace the Cleveland Sage Brush shrubs in our courtyard which were not doing too well after the first year or two. We selected these little (for now) bottle brush shrubs which will (hopefully) display more of these little red flowers as they mature.

On Monday, Verna and I removed the old sage shrubs (mostly dead) and replaced them with these three, which were in five gallon containers from the nursery where we bought them. I managed to locate the irrigation feeders and placed them where they would drizzle the little shrubs when the irrigation timer setting turns the water on.

These shrubs supposedly will grow to three feet in diameter and two to three feet in height. I will post pictures of them again next year when they mature. Click on the image to enlarge.