Category Archives: Flowers

It’s gotten warm for a few days and we see trees starting to bud and flower all over town. Nothing yet from the pear and apple trees in our back yard (I’m keeping an eye on them!) but in just 48 hours or so the neighbor’s trees along the street have gone from bare to an explosion of pink flowers.

They’re gorgeous! Two separate plant-ID apps on my phone identify these as “Cherry-Plum” flowers. Okay!

It’s also great to see a ton of bees all over all of the flowers.

As long as they’re not building a nest in the walls at our house, the bees and I can be good neighbors!

No scent detected while I was taking these pictures, but then again, with all of the bees I wasn’t trying to get my face in there too close.

I remember a grade school joke about a kid failing a spelling test because he spelled that common red flower as “brose.” The teacher says, “There’s no ‘b’ in ‘rose.'” The kid says, “There was in the one I was sniffing!”

Up along Maple Street, where we go to the grocery store on Main, there’s a line of what I believe to be apple trees, that are covered in very similar white blossoms. They exploded into flowers over the last week as well.

Decent rain over the winter, warming up with lots of Sun now, spring is announcing its presence with authority in the High Desert!

These little in-ground planters?

I’m curious, but I don’t know how to phrase that question for Google.

Unlike the thistle (and thorns) over by the fence, this one was full of these cute little flowers.

Eventually I would like to get a big rose bush or something else in here, maybe another fruit tree. (It’s over next to the pear tree and the apple tree.) But for now it was pretty little yellow desert flowers.

Along with home ownership (despite it being the awesome Forever Home) comes maintenance. I mentioned a while back that we were starting to get grass growing out in the front yard, coming up through the rocks & gravel. It was cute at first. It stopped being cute a while back when the grass spread all over and the weeds joined the party.

Before the nice neighbors who we like were moved to say anything “polite,” and before I tried to kill myself doing yard work like I’m 50 years younger using time that I don’t have and haven’t had in 50 years, we brought in a pro today.

But before he got here, I went out and took some “before” pictures, and found a few that are flower-like, in a desert, hardscrabble, tough-as-nails sort of way.

Out in the back yard I found this thistle of some sort.

The good news is that Eddie did a great job at a reasonable price and will be back every two weeks to keep this sort of thing from happening again.

Congratulations! The Money Pit now has its own gardener!

It’s the freakin’ desert, after all. Okay, Death Valley’s worse, but even just a couple miles from civilization it can get brutal out here. Hot. Dry. Unrelenting. You have to be tough to survive in the wild under these circumstances, and tough often is the same as “something only a mother could love.”

Most of the yard, front, back, and sides is either “desert landscaping” (i.e., colorful gravel) or artificial turf. Along the edges, all over, are these scraggly-ass looking things. I really need to find the yard trimmer at the front of the PODS unit and clean them up, that is, chop them to bits and dispose of them.

But there’s this one by the front sidewalk, right next to where I found my new little lizard friend:

What are these pretty, pink flowers at the base? At first I though it was a piece of plastic wrap or trash that had gotten caught there, but they’re definitely flower petals.

Maybe?

Upon closer examination, those flowers have a woof and a weave to them. They’re frayed on the edges. They’re fake.

So that leads to the next mystery – who put them there? It certainly doesn’t look random or accidental.

Does our quiet little suburban neighborhood have a secret weed decorator?

Was it the lizard?