One of the things I say that I miss most from my homes in Connecticut, South Carolina, and Washington are my gardens.  We always had a large vegetable garden as well as flower beds. My favorite was always my Lilly bed. I had a wide variety of Lillies and was always adding to the collection. My love of Lillies began on my grandmother’s farm when I was a child. She had large clumps of daylillies in the yard and I loved their vibrant color. I can’t get any vegetables to grow here and my green thumb has mostly turned brown. This is not to say that our yard is without color through. There are several hardy plants that not only thrive in the desert but look beautiful. I have two of them in my front yard.

This is a Desert Bird of Paradise, sometimes known as a Mexican Bird of Paradise. It is an evergreen shrub that blooms through most of the summer and fall. Every year in January we cut it down to a stump about 10 inches high and by summer the dang thing in about six feet high and wide. We have even shut off the water line to it and it still grows large and beautiful.

This is a Bougainvillea. I don’t know if you would call this a shrub or what. It grows on long woody stalks that originate on a common trunk.  See the tiny little white parts? Those are the flowers. All that glorious color is actually the leaves that grow closest to the flowers.

This is another plant that is very hard to kill. You can chop it back or let it go and it will continue to put on a show all Spring, Summer, and Fall.  Looking at his picture made me want to put on my garden gloves and go do some pruning.. then I remembered the thorns on it and decided that I have other things I should be doing inside…

Like cleaning up and organizing my pantry. What a mess. This actually brings me to the activity that sent me running for the camera today and then to the computer to blog about life in the desert.

I picked up the canvas shopping bag and saw this fellow giving me the evil eye! This is a Bark Scorpion and he is one of the biggest and fattest that I’ve ever seen. Believe me, as soon and I saw him I was shaking in my boots! Well, I would have been except for the fact that I was wearing flip flops and my bare toes were poking out dangerously close to this creepy creature. When we first moved to Arizona we received lots of warnings about scorpions from the natives (anyone who had survived at least one summer here.) Most of them said the same thing, you can’t kill them with Raid and you can’t stomp them to death because they can flatten themselves out so much that a good stomp doesn’t bother them. The comments about flattening themselves out usually included information about how you can’t keep them out of the house because they can slither through even the most weather stripped of doors and windows.Well, “they” weren’t completely right.

I am here to tell you that you CAN kill them with Raid! I keep about 42 cans of it around the house, just in case.  You can also give them a good stomping and finish them off but I wasn’t going to try that in flip flops. Here are some other truths about Bark Scorpions (at least until somebody finds something on Snopes to prove me wrong.) Bark Scorpions are the only scorpions that can hang upside down. That means that when I lifted the canvas bag he could have been dangling from the bottom and decided to drop down on my toes. I’m so glad that he didn’t do that.They are able to climb vertical surfaces so you often find them on your walls. You can also find them on your ceiling.. first thing in the morning.. when you are lying in bed and fist open your eyes. No, that hasn’t happened to me but I know a couple of people who have had that shock. One gal I know woke up when the critter dropped down, landed on her eye and stung her! OMG, now I’m going to be too creeped out to sleep tonight! I should have left that memory buried.  They can’t climb slick surfaces like glass. This means that you can trap one in an old jelly jar and spend countless hours amusing yourself by watching him grow frustrated by his inability to escape. Time to move on..

This little lizard use to live in my yard. I apologize for him looking kind of dead but Abbey hasn’t learned that play things are more fun when they are alive. She has taken to leaving her former playmates at my front door so I need to check it frequently when I am expecting guests. Nothing says “Welcome” like a carcass to step over. He really is a pretty lizard. I’m looking but I haven’t found him online to tell you what type he is. Times like this I miss one of our previous cats, Duffy. Duffy loved to play with critters but he never harmed them. He was even friends with a family of squirrels that lived in the back yard. He also liked the company of other cats and would frequently bring them home to visit. One of his frequent guests arrived one day with a note stapled to his collar. It read, “Get your own damn cat, this one already has a home!” I guess we let him spend a little too much time visiting.

And that’s pretty much my day unless you want me to take photos of fish poop (I am going to clean the aquarium next.) I think we will skip that. In fact, lets forget all the creepy dead stuff and allow our minds to drift back to the beauty.

Much better.