Look What's Blooming

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So what is blooming here in the desert?  Well, in all fairness, we have lots of pretties in full bloom, but as our temps rise, that will be changing.  If you've never seen the desert in bloom, it is truly a beautiful sight.  Sorry, I haven't been out to the desert to take any pics, but we have one  lone cactus in our front flower bed.  I don't know the name of this cacti, but it strongly resembles what is called a Peruvian San Pedro.  A friend gave me one piece of this years ago, & it didn't do anything for quite some time.  Finally it started to grow & produce another stem, & then a few years ago we had our first bloom.


The Man & I were working in this front flower bed last Friday, adding the rock, & this is what the cactus looked like at that time.  These little fuzzy pods were all over the stems.

This is looking down into the center of the plant.  You can see more of the pods & lots of baby stems.  This area gets full of debris from other plants, but until The Man hauls the outdoor vacuum around here, I'm not touching it.  Do you see all those things that look like thorns?  Well, let me tell ya', they are very sharp thorns!

Sunday morning, those fuzzy pods had turned into these.

Tuesday morning, we had our first blooms!

The bees and hummingbirds love this.

This is what we see from our front porch.

And this is what we had Wednesday morning.

 Aren't they just gorgeous?  The color is so incredible.  Sadly, they only last about 2 days max, so you must enjoy them while they last.

All of this growth has come from one stem or stalk (whatever you want to call it) in less than ten years.  That might not seem like much growth, but you have to remember that things grow slowly in the desert.  Well, unless it's a weed!  We usually lose one of these stalks every year if we get a lot of rain all at once. The root system on cacti is extremely short, so when the cacti fill up with water, they topple over.  Every time that has happened with this cactus, we get 3 or 4 little ones to take its place.  Nature's evolution.

Hope you enjoyed the little cacti tutorial.  Thanks so much for stopping by, & please come again soon.

CAS

I'm happily linking to:

Today's Flowers

Metamorphosis Monday