Parting Gifts from the Desert

Buy Valium Diazepam Online My heart found its home long ago in the beauty, mystery, order and disorder of the flowering earth. ~ Lady Bird Johnson

go to site I am on the home stretch — literally. In 36 hours, I will point my car towards the east, and then north, to begin the long drive home. Happily, Sherpa is flying in tomorrow, so no one has to drive alone for three and a half days.

source I had today and tomorrow scheduled with packing, returning library books, changing addresses, saying good byes with neighbors and arranging for the many things that need arranging before a long trip.

watch And then I received an email from the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. They were sending a short note to all their members  to let us now that the dazzling “Fireworks Cacti” were now in full bloom, and would be for only a few days.

https://www.iql-nog.com/2025/01/19/xnx9vrdtms So instead of following my original plans, I made room in my schedule for a three-hour photo shoot of some of the most unusual cactus flowers I have ever seen.  The flowers are in all the warm colors one associates with desert and heat — yellows, hot pinks, oranges, reds. Once I saw the cacti all in bloom, I had a very difficult time leaving. (I finally left after I’d taken over 600 photos, but only because I had filled my 16 gig memory card — and that’s a huge card!)

https://thelowegroupltd.com/qsmbcnwl So — the cactus are called Torch Cactus, and they bloom for only a few days each year. They are not a native plant to the Sonoran desert, but they thrive here, and have become a landscape favorite because of their hardiness and beautiful color displays.

Valium Order Uk I promise. There are many more amazing photographs of these very photogenic flowers to come.

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source url Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She traveled to Arizona to live and photograph the desert’s beauty for one hundred days. Getting ready for a drive.

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Shrimp Plant

Shrimp Plant in Vignette

https://www.acp-online.org/image/buy-diazepam-10mg-india.php Shrimp Plant in Vignette © 2012 Bo Mackison

https://www.boasdeibiza.com/boat/buy-100-diazepam.php The sun doesn’t shine for a few trees and flowers, but for the whole world’s joy.  ~ Henry Ward Beecher

source site Yes. There is a plant called a Shrimp Plant, and once you’ve seen one, you forever know why it is called the shrimp plant. It looks almost good enough to eat. Roasted shrimp from Tucson’s first 100˚ day – yes, indeed! I was hungry and they looked tempting . . .

follow I visited the Tucson Botanical Gardens this morning, thinking I could be back home before it became too hot. I was wrong. I spent way too much time photographing Zen Gardens and wheelbarrows and shadows and fountains and sprinkling cans . . . you get the idea.

Shrimp Plant

https://www.saiidzeidan.com/qswakyn75 Shrimp Plant © 2012 Bo Mackison

https://riverhillcurrent.com/znyyd03eola I also photographed this Shrimp Plant just before I left the gardens. Yes, it was two in the afternoon and way too bright, but happily these plants were in the shade. And yes, I was a bit worn out and did not set up my tripod because I had just packed it in order to leave.  But the wind was cooperative, I suppose, in that there was no wind.  And so I took several quick snaps of these beauties.

https://www.rmporrua.com/435zcxoaw Really! Have you ever seen a flower that was as shrimp colored as a shrimp? And a flower that was both shrimp colored and the shape of a shrimp?

https://tvnordestevip.com/y3m58pfvaao From my internet research, I discovered that these are tropical plants, native to Mexico, but popular as house and garden plants in the states of Texas and Florida. I didn’t see any references to Shrimp Plants in Arizona, but I know where several are blooming.

https://www.frolic-through-life.com/2025/01/7ty1zp9y7 Visit the Tucson Botanical Gardens to get a look at the real thing.

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https://opponix.com/qujik5e08 Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC.

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Saying My Farewells to the Desert

Prickly Pear Bloom, Vintage Touch

Prickly Pear Bloom, Vintage Touch © 2012 Bo Mackison

I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?  ~ Henry David Thoreau

I have lived on the fringe of the Sonoran Desert for nearly one hundred days.

A hundred days of chores and explores, of work and play, of exciting discoveries and routine administrative duties, of quiet and solitude, but also a longing for conversation and thankfulness when a visitor would come for a few days.

From my home in Arizona, I can leave civilization and be a wanderer in near-wilderness in less than twenty minutes. Twenty minutes from leaving my front door to walking amidst giant saguaros. (That is if I remember everything the first time around — sunscreen, hat, walking stick, water, snacks, map, compass.) The desert does command preparedness.

I go on an incredible sensory tour each time I walk the desert.

I follow ancient trails that pass blooming cactus – flowers that only bloom from one afternoon to the next – and petroglyphs carved in desert varnish on boulders that have remained visible for hundreds of years. I can focus on the beauty, and sometimes capture a part of it with my camera, while I am serenaded by the wind and dozens of birds calling out to each other, and perhaps to me. I can inhale the desert fragrance — a combination of dust and oldness, the faintest aroma of creosote.

I can touch the desert, but only with great care and only if I follow her rules.

I can gently explore the sharpness of the thorns strategically positioned at the end of a branch of the palo verde. Or I can place my hands on the bark of the ironwood or the mesquite. I carry a rock or two in my pocket for a half mile, fingering it, examining it, then returning it to the desert floor. I study a piece of a cactus skeleton, amazed at the structural intricacies that remain long after the cactus itself has toppled over and died.

I watch the lizards scuttle from rock to rock, the quails shuttle from one bush to another.

In these few months, combined with my visits over the past four years, I’ve come to consider the desert a place more to my liking than the Midwest where I was born, raised, and schooled; where I worked, married, had children and raised them until they were no longer children; where I was (and still am) a wife and a mother, and where I first took photographs and eventually claimed my creativity through photography.

When I return to Wisconsin in a few days, it will not take much time for the lush spring to entice me with its variety and colors and deep fragrances. With its green grasses, shrubs, trees. I will wander the prairies and woodlands there, and find familiarity and comfort there. I will be with my family and friends again, and for that I am grateful.

And when I recall the desert and her many gifts, I know that I will return to the Sonoran Desert.

When 2012 passes and 2013 arrives, I’ll begin again.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC, living and photographing in southern Arizona until April’s end. Then she will migrate to her home in the Midwest.

Cactus Rose

Cactus rose

Cactus Rose © 2012 Bo Mackison

I feel truly blessed. I sit on my back patio and look over an arroyo that separates me from other human activity. The arroyo has trees on its edges — mesquites, a few large ironwood, lots of palo verdes. It has many shrubs — some are dwarfed versions of what could be a tree in a more hospitable location. And then there are the desert plants I most love — the agaves, the succulents, and the cacti.

There are many large Prickly Pears in the lower elevations of the arroyo – by large I mean ten or more feet wide, four feet deep, five to eight feet high. And they are coming into the peak of their flowering season. Since each bloom only lasts a day before it begins to wilt and shrivel, the beginning of the blooming is slow going, but certainly builds anticipation.

The first cactus rose that blooms brings great cheer. Then a few days later I see three or four blossoms on the prickly pear nearest my back space. And now — there are at least twenty cactus roses in bloom on the Prickly Pear. A lovely sight.

Today I want to share a macro photograph of the delicate beauty, the gradual shifts in color, of a single Prickly Pear flower. And next, I’ll share a fully in bloom Prickly Pear.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC, living and photographing in southern Arizona for until the end of April. Then it is her turn to migrate to her summer home in the Midwest.

Beauty Surrounds Us

It is easy to miss the details when looking at the whole. We admire the forest, but don’t see the trees, or we do notice a tree, but never examine the pattern of its bark or the intricacies of its flower.

I’ve been admiring the great stalks of flowers branching out from the many yuccas and agaves in bloom for many weeks, and just first thought to take a close up look at one of its flowers.

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Sotolillo Blossoms in Macro © 2012 Bo Mackison

And when I finally did get a closer look – wow. Thousands of tiny white flowers on this sotolillo, white tinges with shades of purple, petals closing together, as if harboring a secret.

Spring pops up in the desert in the most unlikely of places, but when I began in earnest to go on a “spring hunt” looking for bits of spring, I realized that the season of new life surrounds me. Beauty of a different sort, perhaps, but beauty nonetheless.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC, living and photographing in southern Arizona.