Eucalyptus is a common tree that has been imported to the desert. They do well in the heat and dry climate. This one is in someone's backyard and dwarfs the house. I am not a fan of eucalyptus and sure I wouldn't want this sixty-foot giant next to my house.
Many people have date palms like this one. You can see the dead fronds hanging down on this tree. Palms look best when the dead fronds are kept trimmed. The dates are just developing on the trees. They are the butterscotch-colored section of the tree.
Many of the older homes in our part of the world have carports rather than garages. This person closed in the side of his carport with adobe block and topped it with ocotillo ribs that have been built into a frame. I like the rustic look.The rusty box on the roof is an evaporative cooler. In the old days most houses in our town had evaporative cooling. It works by pumping water over aspen pads and a motor in the cooler draws hot air through the wet pads to cool it, before blowing it into the house. It is effective in very dry climates like ours , where the daytime summer humidity is often as low as 5 or 6 percent. Most people have converted to air conditioning.
This yard has creosote buses for landscaping. The are a native plant and were probably covering the lot before the house was built. I think the builder left those that weren't cleared from the house pad.
This plant is pyracantha. It is a favorite of mine. The plant is drought tolerant and in the fall and winter has a great display of tiny red berries. This specimen is very well cared for by the owner. As you can see, it is shaped to fit in with the curving adobe wall. You can see where the homeowner keeps the bush trimmed away from the electric meter.
Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky
4 comments:
I like the butterscotch part of the tree. do you think your neighbors are going to complain about you taking pics?
what are "hearts of Palm" ?
do you eat cactus?
do you ever get dust storms?
I would totally build a wall around the house if there was gonna be dust storms.
Is fog possible where you live?
we get a lot of fog here.
Heart of Palm is a pulpy substance from the inside of the tree. Our palms are not suitable for eating.
I don't eat cactus, although some people do. Native Americans have always harvested sagurao and prickly pear fruit.
Our city is too developed to get really big dust storms anymore.
We occasionally get fog in the winter after a really wet period of rainfall. We had fog just a couple of weeks ago.
I always heard eucalyptus kills everything on the ground beneath it -- one reason not to have them, I suppose.
We had a pyracantha when I lived in Florida and the darn thing never produced a single berry. Later we learned that it was a flowering, but non-berry-bearing, variety. Who knew?
My friend Doug makes cactus tacos and they're good.
Post a Comment