Southwest Desert Gardening

Thanks to the owner of this garden for allowing me to photograph it and use the photos here. All photographs were taken May 4, 2007. Click on the thumbnails for a larger view.
This is a very small city garden, but is artfully arranged to utilize a variety of plants. Roses are the featured plant throughout [...]

The first hybrid tea bloom of the year is always exciting in the high desert. One never knows exactly when to expect it, nor what it will look like. What have the late cold spells and especially the prolonged high winds done to the buds? Have thrips already damaged the bloom (for those of us [...]

Yesterday I had the privilege to judge at the Tucson Rose Show. Judging roses is always fun, but the Tucson show was especially enjoyable this year.
One of the things that made it so enjoyable was meeting new clerks, Cathy and Lena Rose, a mother-daughter team. Lena is eight years old, and not only clerked, but [...]

The desert and the native plants growing there never cease to amaze me.
Prickly pear cactus is a native plant used in a lot of landscaping in Tucson and the Sonoran Desert in general.
Yesterday I saw this large piece of prickly pear that had been broken off its main stem and roots by a late freeze [...]

New Mexico is the only place I have ever lived where Spring is not my favorite season.  And that is because of the high winds that are a staple of Spring in the high desert.
Gardeners here learn very quickly to keep their plants well-hydrated, at this time of the year as much for the winds as [...]

Less than 48 hours after posting “Attention, Hummingbird Lovers” and getting my hummingbird feeders up (three weeks late!), I saw my first hummingbird of the year feeding at one of the feeders.  This is the earliest I have seen a hummer in my garden any year.  It was a Black Chin male, and I hope he [...]

Friday, April 6, I had the good fortune to visit the Mesa Community College Rose Garden.  The Garden is sponsored by the Mesa-East Valley Rose Society, and was designed by LeRoy Brady, who has done much of the fabulous landscaping along Arizona highways.  A full history of the Garden can be found here.
In spite of [...]

The Desert Southwest is fortunate to be home, at least part of the year, to an amazing variety of birds. The low desert, especially southeastern Arizona and around Tucson, have hummers during the winter months. Here in the high desert we have them only during the warmer part of the year.
I generally put up the [...]

In the first post of this blog, I bemoaned the effects of the freak snow storm in late December on Mermaid, the climbing hybrid bracteata that was the largest rose in my yard.
Spring 2006:

After The Big Snow of December 2006:

The cleanup was not completed until early March, and Mermaid had to be sawed off at [...]

On April 2, Harry and David announced the sale of Jackson and Perkins, major wholesaler and retailer of roses in the United States.
According to the announcement,
Jackson & Perkins was founded in 1872 and is the nation’s largest
marketer of premium rose plants, grown on approximately 3,200 acres and
harvesting over six million rose plants annually. Jackson & [...]