Bok Tower Gardens (Florida) - Part 2

I posted about the tower at the Bok Tower Gardensyesterday. Today the focus is on the plants and a few animals. Lizards seemed to be everywhere and it was warm enough for them to be very active.

The squirrels were acclimated to people. This one listened to the carillon concert with us - keeping his back to us as he perched on a neighboring bench.

The slide show below shows a number of other features in garden: a metal Venus flytrap sculpture among tropical vegetation, oranges glowing in the sun, bees on an agave flower, a Monarch butterfly on orange and red flowers, coral stones used for paving with moss growing in larger indentions, a pineapple type plant, a spider web, the center of a cycad.

Tucson Botanical Gardens

I am just now finding a day to post about my visit to the Tucson Botanical Gardens in June. In looking back through my photographs, I found it very difficult to select a small enough number for this post.

The Gardens are an oasis in a heavily populated part of Tucson. It is obvious that they have been getting better and better as the many years of their existence have gone by. One of my favorite features was a water fountain that had water coming out of a yucca pod shaped sculpture.

There was a dinosaur garden complete with dinosaur figures and types of plants that existed during that time period.

I’ve never seen so many art bird houses. I took many pictures of the creations. The one to the left is one of my favorites.

The Japanese rock garden looks right at home in Tucson. It works well in a desert and looks as soothing as it would in a totally different climate.

There were plenty of lizards - doing pushups and eying the people in their space too. This one looks quite haughty.  

Decorative tile is used on benches and for some signage. It too fits the desert - durable even in high heat. 

The best of the rest are in the slide show below. I realize now that these gardens will be on my list of ‘things to do’ every time I go back to Tucson.

Gila Monster

The big excitement on our last afternoon in Tucson, Arizona was the first monsoon rain of the season and the large gila monster that emerged from the rocks beside the pool of our rental house. It was relatively still at first, looking like a strangely patterned stuffed toy. Then it moved. It leaned over to get a drink from the pool while the camera was retrieved. It posed for a picture and then sauntered off to its den.

We had been in the house for a week and enjoying the area around the pool without noticing the hole just under one of the poolside rocks. I’m glad we finally saw the gila monster and relieved that it did not come out unexpectedly while someone was standing right beside its burrow! I supposed it was good that the pool was nearby since the Wikipedia entry says that sometimes the only way to get them to release was they bite it to submerge them in water. 

Desert Collages - March 2013

Today is a savoring of the vacation I had back in March in Arizona. I’ve made some collages of desert images.

Barrel cactus, lizards, cholla fruit, the edges of aloe, lichen. The eye searches for anything that is not the color of sand. The very sparseness of the desert highlights the shapes and colors.

The sky seems bluer in the desert. The tall spires of the desert spoon are not colorful but their shapes are classics of the desert.

And what about the saguaros and aloes. All the shades of green are there. One even has leaves outlined in white.

So - hear I am more than a month after the vacation - still enjoying the time in this place very different from the lushness of Maryland.