F**cked

Now that I have your attention.

Flocked.
This palo verde has dropped its sesame seed sized leaves and put on this sulfurous mantle.

If you are in the Sonoran desert now and not in a coma, yellow is an inescapable fact of life, and who'd want to escape this?!  As I sat down to make this post I had to laugh.  I checked my email first and had a message from a friend and fellow docent (whom I greatly admire) at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum announcing a new post on her wonderful desert blog In the Sonoran Sun.  Her blog post topic?  The Yellow Moment.  Carole couldn't be more right.  This is a moment we anticipate annually, but I somehow always forget just how YELLOW it is.  It is a bittersweet time; most of the yellow blossoms will soon disappear under the searing platinum sun of summer in the Sonoran desert.

Here are some images I took this morning on a walk around our garden.

A Gila Woodpecker breakfasting on the hummingbird nectar

Golden Columbines in the barrio garden

Desert marigold tangled in a barrel cactus

An eruption of Mexican sunflowers

The scent from this chocolate flower can induce a relapse in a chocoholic

The fruit from last year's barrel cactus flowers

Prickly pear bloom, lemon yellow on the aqua and lavender pads

Variegated agave...what big, and purple, teeth you have!

Palo brea blossoms

Rejoice

In the kitchen happily looking out through the rain glazed window to the barrio garden.

A rare, and cold (in the 40's at 10 Am in mid-April with several 90+ days behind us), rain.  But oh-so-welcome.  One last day for books and hot tea and using the oven for dinner tonight, but the rain is the best part.

Sunday Morning in Spring

Our favorite mesquite has leafed out this past week,
returning shade to the barrio garden

The weather has been unseasonably warm this weekend -- yesterday it was 95, today a little cooler.  Moving on towards noon it might make you retreat to a cool house, open all night and closed up early to keep from having to turn on the A/C (something we resist as long as possible).  But it is finally spring after the hardest, most damaging winter we've experienced here in Tucson, and it is so wonderful to see things flowering, leafing out, and taking off.

With warmer weather comes the return of outdoor eating.  The back porch is the morning destination of choice with coffee, binoculars, camera, and bird books in hand.  We hold court there for a couple of hours, watching the bird circus, having breakfast, taking pictures, and generally congratulating ourselves for living in the gorgeous Sonoran Desert.

Some of our breakfast companions:

Me and my shadow

Ocotillos make the best perches for birders ever!

This Abert's towhee sang to us during breakfast

After a while we decided to get a few things done, and took a tour of the yard, checking for signs of life in plants badly damaged by the Big February Freeze.  Most things survived (a moment of silence for the galloping cactus please) and some are clearly thriving.  We won't be throwing in the gardening towel any time soon, though we might fine tune our native plants to those that can take temps in the teens and still bounce back.

This hedgehog cactus came through the chill just fine

Cactus wren nest, extra padding

I had gotten a new bottle of meds for my dog with a huge wad of cotton under the cap (why on earth do they do that?).  Rather than throw it in the trash I pulled it apart and took it out to the garden last week, hanging bits on several of the plants around the yard.  Sure enough, it was salvaged by a cactus wren to use in at least one of his several nests in our chain fruit cholla cactus just outside the garden wall.  Maybe now he'll quit stealing stuffing from one of my outdoor pillows!

Happy Sunday!