And still more desert flowers

Last Friday, Torrey and I went hiking down one of the big washes near here. Last year, I had found quite a few flowers there and I wanted to see what this year looked like. I wasn’t disappointed. There are a great variety of wildflowers in Arizona, you just have to be in the right place. I am seeing a lot of photos of hillsides just covered in orange poppies, maybe next year we can be in those places.

But first, the ocotillo are blooming.

This was an ocotillo at sunset. Some of the buds were open. I don’t know why some will open, and some not. Maybe something to do with the bees and hummingbirds.

These cactus are so fascinating to me. Just look at that lethal looking stem. Some of the thorns on these are an inch long. And at the very end, this beautiful bunch of blooms.

This is what the whole cactus looks like. They are pretty tall, 6, 7, 8 feet anyway.

The hummingbirds like them. There was a really little one on this flower when I was about ready to take a photo.

And, they have no scent at all. There was a short one, so I had to sniff it. Nothing.

So the flowers I found in the wash the other day. Such a variety of colors. This is a desert lupine. This is crazy to me, because when we go to Wyoming, lupine are everywhere. They basically look the same.

This is an Arizona bluebell. They are everywhere, and so tiny and delicate.

I have no idea what this tiny yellow flower is. I looked in my book, I looked online, nothing. There were a lot of them though.

Yellow cup primrose. There are a lot of these around our RV too.

Desert chicory.

These tiny daisies are all around the RV. The woolly daisy is smaller than a dime in diameter.

This is a sand blazing star. I only found two of these, so I don’t know how common they are. They are a very delicate flower that’s about 1 inch across.

And this, this is a ghost flower. I found one of these last year and was really hoping to find another. I think, but I don’t know for sure, that they are not very common. I read that they mimic the sand blazing star to trick bees into going into them for nectar. The tricky part is, they don’t produce nectar, but the bee doesn’t know that. The bee still carries pollen to the next flower though. They are so unusual, and so delicate. It amazes me they grow here at all.

And finally, this is a beaver tail cactus flower. This photo was taken the day we saw the bighorn sheep.

All the other cactus around here are just getting flower buds, so we will miss them entirely. There are more ground flowers though that look ready to do something. I don’t know if I will see anything before Thursday or not.

I hope so, I love to see new flowers.