Our one flowering wildflower on this wonderful day was the pretty perennial called penny cress or candy tufts. It is the former Thlaspi fendleri, but is now Nocceae fendleri. That’s my photo of the plant and it doesn’t do the plant justice. If you get a chance, you should look it up at the web site SEINet. Alligator bark juniper apparently is an old common name. Now a days it is simply alligator juniper. I’m now up to date, but after seeing all those male juniper plants getting ready to explode with pollen I’m thinking it could be called “pollengator juniper.”  (check out my photo below ..read more

Do I talk about dock every late winter and early spring? It sure seems like I do. Well, it's truly the first green plant one sees as winter ends and maybe that’s why I get so excited about it. Green! There are 15 species of Rumex found in Arizona, some of which are introduced exotic species. Rumex hymenospepalus is found all over the state below 6,000 feet and it emerges in late winter and is blooming by early spring. Rumex is the Latin word for docks or sorrels. If you grow sorrel in your herb garden then you have a Rumex species and as near as I can figure the only difference between docks a ..read more

Yet another love affair with an Arizona native plant. It could change next week and I’ll be in love with a new native plant, but listen, I got my first legitimate horticulture gig in the spring of 1980 (legitimate as in not pot, but landscape plants) at a wholesale nursery northwest of Tucson. At that wonderful nursery that gave a job to a “desperate for a job” fellow we grew the plant called desert spoon or Dasylirion wheeleri. Fast forward 40 or more years and I was working a few days a week for a large wholesale grower out in Cochise County, AZ where we grew thousands of desert spoons. I th ..read more

In the early 1990s when this story and song came about I was poking around the West Branch starting at Ajo Road and north almost to Starr Pass where I worked at Desert Survivors Nursery. It actually starts near Irvington Road and it meanders through a lot of private property, so you just can’t go wandering along it like a certain naive plant geek did back then. Yikes, I wish someone had told me! Anyway, I still love singing this song. Apologies for a sour note or two, but thanks so much for listening.     There are some cool flora and fauna found on the west branch, so it might be f ..read more

Come on blue dicks and come on spring! Oh, while figuring out that the genus Dichelostemma translates as “a garland which is twice-parted to the middle,” I also discovered that the name was created by the German botanist Karl Sigismund Kunth. He did the botany of all the plants that the explorers Alexander Von Humbolt and Aimé Jacques Alexandre Bonpland brought back from their 1799 to1804 explorations of Central and South America. That’s 3,600 new species! I also learned that when naming species, Kunth paid “special attention to minute analysis of floral structures.” I’ll say. The photos are ..read more

Even as a child I was astounded by the silence of snow. I wonder if there is a name for silent snow? Around our little homestead it’s called, “the snow that helps Petey sleep.” The plant that helped me sleep one recent winter night is Arizona rosewood. I first saw Arizona rosewoods growing among the oaks around Molino Basin in the Catalina Mountains near Tucson. That was around 1968 or ’69. Yikes!!! Later in the 1980s when I was working at a wholesale nursery in Tucson we grew and offered rosewoods as an oleander substitute. It still is and here’s the good news; there are are several species o ..read more

I revealed most of my personal chicken history in this episode. It’s an ongoing saga, though I am much more in control of my crazy love for chickens. I finally recycled all my old hatchery catalogs. Okay that’s not quite true, as I kept one Murray McMurray catalog…just for reference…really. I did love to look at the pictures of the different breeds in those catalogs. Almost always paintings, by the way, and no, I didn’t read them at night under the covers with a flashlight, but oh my gosh, Australorps, Delawares, Wyandottes, Polish, Cornish and Buff Orpingtons! You know what I’m talking about ..read more

After I produced this episode we were driving in the desert outside Bisbee, AZ marveling the silhouettes of viscid acacia and I realized I had written and jabbered about the winter silhouettes of deciduous trees and shrubs several times in the past… like every winter for 30 years. Oh well, the outlines of naked branches against our huge borderlands sky are glorious. The photos are mine and taken of desert willows very near our home. Oh, my pronunciation of the genus Chilopsis got me thinking; botanical Latin is not the language of the Roman Empire, the Latin that I endured for 2 years in midd ..read more

I remembered that one spring when we were up in Santa Fe visiting family and out on a hike it seemed there was a spotted towhee noisily foraging in every shrub. Noisily! Sometimes you will hear them rustling around before you see them and like all towhees they are busy rascals! The genus name Pipilo for towhees was created by Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot in 1816 when he described the eastern species. I’ve found his name associated with a bunch of bird species. He was an early birder…ha, ha. The 2 legged back hop scratch is little more difficult than some of my other dance moves like the twist o ..read more

Desert anemone (Anemone tuberosa) is in the Buttercup Family. Buttercups are the genus Ranuculus and the family name is Ranunculaceae. It’s probably just me, but that is a marvelous name to write and pronounce. Kearney and Peebles’ Arizona Flora lists three species of Anemone , but the taxonomy has changed (a lot!) and there are now two species listed for Arizona. Desert anemone is one of the first wildflowers to bloom in the spring and to see it you’ll need to head to a rocky slope or  canyon sometime in February and that’s where you’ll find it hiding among the rocks. It has a short bloo ..read more