Kudos to our Tough Desert Plants!

An El Paso weatherman announced a startling statistic yesterday—forty-three days of triple digit temperatures this summer.  I knew it had been darn hot lately, but hearing the official statistic set me to wondering how our much-loved outdoor plants have survived the season. 

Not all have, of course.  Returning from an 18 day trip abroad recently, I discovered a few plant casualties as I walked through our property on the first day back. The prissier plants, the ones bought for their colorful blooms, had succumbed to oven-like temperatures. But the majority of plants, especially native and adapted plants, were bravely soldiering on.

Below are images of some of our hardier plants  They may appear less attractive when on sale in nurseries (flowering annuals are so seductive), but they prove to be loyal friends when the weather turns inhospitable.

Candelilla

Number one on my list of native plants is candelilla.  I don't know what I find attractive about sticks coming up out of the ground, but maybe it is the uniqueness of the plant that keeps me digging up clumps to start new plants around the yard. 

Mexican Firebush

Some may say that the Mexican Firebush is invasive.  I prefer to think of it as being very generous.  From one purchased plant, I now have five good-sized plants in various locations on the property.  And when nothing else has the energy to bloom, the firebush is covered with small red blossoms that hummingbirds appear to appreciate as much as I do.  

Fairy Duster

One of the delights of desert plants is their ability to appear tough but produce amazingly delicate blooms.  Below is a close up of a red fairy duster.blossom.  Doesn't it look like it could dust a fairy's house?

Fairy Duster Bloom

Yellow Bells

Yellow Bells looks like a cousin of the common red trumpet vine, but I like the more unusual yellow blooms.  This plant, which has grown quite large, lives in our vegetable garden to give color to the area when the tomatoes and peppers fail to grow (which is unfortunately quite often).

Ruellia

And finally, my favorite plant, Ruellia, or Mexican Petunia.  My son, Clayton, discovered this plant when he was in college in Austin, Texas and bought it because of its delicate lavender blooms.  He soon discovered that the blooms last only one day. The good news is Ruellia blooms again every day under the right circumstances.  This Ruellia is partially shaded from the hot afternoon sun and receives a hearty drink of water every two days. Another Ruellia, which lives in a large pot in the courtyard, is still recovering from too much sun and too little water.  

I know I am not the first to comment on the challenges and rewards of gardening in the Desert Southwest, but I thank my desert plants often (does anyone else talk to your plants?) for their tenacity to grow and produce beauty in difficult circumstances.  

One Sunday Afternoon in the Park

A lazy Sunday loomed before us.  Too lazy if the truth be known.  Where could we go for entertainment in our home town of El Paso, Texas that we hadn't been to at least a dozen times 

before?

Maybe the answer could be found in investigating a new project in our city, the revitalization of Downtown El Paso.  The renovation of the central square of El Paso, San Jacinto Plaza, had taken what seemed like ages to complete (it was really only three years).  We wanted to see if we had received good value for our tax dollars.

San Jacinto Plaza

San Jacinto Plaza, located at the corner of Oregon and Mills Streets, has a proud history, dating from the first part of the 20th century.  It was a transportation hub, first for horse drawn carriages, then for trolleys, and later for city buses and taxicabs, which is when my memories of the park began.  I remember the park as being leafy and green, with benches around the perimeter.  A highlight was the alligator pond inhabited by live alligators.  Later, the plaza fell into disrepair, the alligators had to be moved because of vandalism, and the park atmosphere was anything but welcoming.

How delighted I was as a native El Pasoan to experience the new and improved San Jacinto Plaza, dedicated in April of this year.

"Los Lagartos" -The Alligators

A fiberglass alligator sculpture by Luis Jiménez retains the memory of the live alligators who lived in the pool until the 1970s.

Diners at the plaza cafe

A full-service cafe serves a variety of dishes, including this cup of corn with typical southwestern seasonings.

Another nod to local culture is a court for the game of pitching washers, which goes by the name of huachas in our border region. The game is similar to pitching horseshoes.

Huachas court

Ping-pong tables are also available in the park.  Equipment for playing both huachas and ping-pong is available at the plaza cafe. You may get a sudden inspiration to try out your game skills.

Splash pond

Children cooling off in the splash pond, monitored carefully by moms and dads on benches, reminded me how much fun it can be to be a child, and uninhibited.

I took a moment to soak up the atmosphere of our urban park.  The details on a historic building visible from the park reminded me of an earlier, more elegant era in El Paso.

Historical Building

And I especially enjoyed the flora of the park and made note of which plants I could use in our southwestern style yard.  I love the hardy native and adapted plants that survive and even flourish in the Desert Southwest.  This plant looked to me like a type of bush called "Yellow Bells"or "Esperanza (Hope)" in our region.

Flowering bush in plaza

My husband, Wayne, and I sat on a bench in the park for quite a long time, feeling the excitement and pride of living in a city with a downtown park that is not only an attractive place but an exciting place as well.  Will our out-of-town visitors for Thanksgiving enjoy the park as much as we did?  We have our fingers crossed.

Southwestern Springtime Gardens - An Inspiration!

Recent increased hours of sunlight and warmer temperatures in my home town of El Paso, Texas were enough to set me daydreaming about the spring gardening season ahead. When the El Paso Rock and Cactus Club announced their annual tour of local desert gardens,  I knew how I wanted to spend a leisurely Saturday morning.  My intention was just to ooh and aah over other people's efforts. Little did I know that the tour would inspire a new gardening project at our house.

Here are some of the photos of gardens my husband Wayne and I viewed on the tour that started the creative juices flowing.

A pleasing assortment of rocks, cactus, clay pots, and native plants and bushes.

Purple verbena add color to this desert scene

Blooming Apache Plumes in a raised bed

Desert gardens can be shady too.

Armadillo enjoying life in the garden

A gardener cannot have too many pots

Cairns remind me of walking in Scotland

Back home,  I started feeling guilty about having neglected an area in our yard that receives late afternoon sun, which can be scorching. Gardening had been touch and go in this large area, with only the hardiest of native plants surviving:  Mexican Bird of Paradise, Mesquite bushes, Desert Marigolds, Prickly Pear Cactus, Red Bird of Paradise, Vitex, Golden Ball Lead Tree, and some volunteer Palo Verde trees.  I wandered out into this yard one pleasant evening about thirty minutes before sunset with the intention of doing a little pruning and raking. 

An inspiration built in my mind as I inspected the new growth on plants, listened to the songs of birds and cooing of doves, and looked forward to watching a brilliant sunset.   I saw the perfect spot.  It was under three palo verde trees that would some day grow tall and produce fragrant yellow blossoms.  

Wayne hauled an old metal four seasons bench around from the back yard and positioned it under the palo verdes. We swept off a crumbling sidewalk and used the rocks to create a round planting area. My first thought was to raise wildflowers in the circle, but hardy grasses and  native plants like guara or wallflower may add color needed in an otherwise green and gray landscape.

Here is a picture of the beginning of the newly repurposed yard.  Use your imagination to fill in the details! I'm still daydreaming.

The Two Faces of Mother Nature

When you picture Mother Nature, does she have a kind, benevolent face?  I picture her dressed in flowing robes, tenderly caring for colorful, fragrant flowers in the garden.

But yesterday I saw the evil twin of Mother Nature when high winds, with gusts up to 50 mph, visited my home town of El Paso, Texas.

The winds should not have been a great surprise to anyone who is familiar with springtime in the Desert Southwest. We can't escape our typical seasonal weather pattern, with temperatures warming up to the 80's to tease us, followed by cold fronts moving in to drop temperatures and stir up clouds of dust.

But when I awoke this morning, Mother Nature had been extremely mischievous in our front and back yards.

A large yucca plant had blown over and was blocking the front steps to the house.

The chinaberry tree, that I had been checking every day for signs of its heavenly scented blossoms, had cracked, and one of its large limbs had fallen over a walkway. 

Not too pretty, Mother Nature!  But she had also left delights in the garden this springtime.

A large Wallflower "Bowled Mauve" (Erysimum) that I thought had died during our long, hot summer, came back to life, putting out purple spikes in all directions.

A very large Cassia shrub in the pool yard has been a mass of aromatic yellow blossoms for at least three weeks now, perfuming the whole area, especially if we are lucky enough to have a hint of moisture in the air.

Climbing roses against a stone wall are an early springtime delight and are always good for a sweet whiff as you pass by. 

But maybe the plants I truly respect are the rough, tough native plants that give so much beauty with so little care. Mother Nature must love them.

Such impressive flowers from a small, thorny cactus.

And the gangly creosote bush in the front yard has recently put on a show of small yellow flowers. Creosote bushes (Larrea tridentata) are well known in the Desert Southwest for emitting an aroma similar to that of witch hazel after a spring shower. This must have been the year for creosotes, because we have probably twenty volunteer plants on our property.  I'm not going to chop down a one.   

I may have to modify my image of Mother Nature, realizing that she (like all of us, I suppose) occasionally has a bad day and puts on her ugly face.

I'm hoping she stays in a good mood until summer  arrives, bringing us long,leisurely days, colorful sunsets, and cool desert evenings.

Gorgeous blooms from not so gorgeous plants

I started to call this post "Gorgeous blooms from ugly plants," but I didn't want to speak harshly of the native plants and cacti found in the Desert Southwest.  Just like a mother who thinks all of her children are beautiful, I also love all of my plants.  It's just that some of them are a little hard to appreciate until they burst into bloom.

Last weekend found me at the Florafest Native Plant Sale, a fundraiser for the museum at the University of Texas at El Paso.  Many of the plants sold there were native to our region or at least had a good chance of thriving locally.  No prissy plants were allowed!

I often chuckle when I see colorful annuals displayed by home improvement stores at the first hint of warm weather. An  Arizona writer ( Yard Full of Sun)  compared those kinds of annuals to, shall I say using a more polite term, streetwalkers. The Florafest plants weren't pretty or seductive at first glance, so buyers had to understand their potential or be willing to take a risk.  I  took the bait and filled up my Radio Flyer red wagon with many new, exciting species.

My new plants aren't in bloom yet, but I decided to walk around our property and take pictures of plants that have transformed themselves from ugly ducklings into beautiful swans recently by putting on attractive flowers.

Chocolate flower

My husband asked me recently if there was a weed growing in this pot in the courtyard.. Certainly not..  It is a chocolate flower, so called because the yellow flowers, especially in early morning, have the wonderful scent of chocolate.

  

We have a long flower bed by the swimming pool where my husband sowed two packages of wildflower seeds several years ago.  I don't even bother to weed the bed, because the wildflowers themselves look like weeds until they bloom.

Wildflower

Prickly pear blossom

Prickly pear cacti are scary plants. Beware of the large thorns on this variety. But what unusual colors their flowers come in.  This bloom is a peachy-yellow color.

The color of the blooms on this hedgehog cactus half buried in dried mesquite leaves amazed me one morning as I was bringing in the morning newspaper.

Hedgehog cactus

Ocotillos are sneaky plants.  Just when you are about to pull them up because they look dead, they burst into bloom.  Compare these two ocotillo plants from our front yard.

Ocotillo with no leaves or blossoms.  Is it dead?

Ocotillo with small green leaves and red blooms

This final plant  I (ahem) appropriated from a vacant lot in our neighborhood.  Imagine my delight to find it in bloom with pale yellow flowers several months after installation in a bump out area along the front sidewalk.

Orphan plant

Native plants are relatively easy to care for and can survive a little neglect ( I hate it when plants are described as "thriving on neglect."  What living thing could do that ?).  Native plant owners also don't have to huff and puff hauling the plants in and out of the house for the changing seasons. And oh those wonderful, surprising, brilliant, colorful blooms!  .