Cactus Garden

It's heating up in Desert Hot Springs, but the mornings are still clear, calm, cool, and beautful. Between six and eight I try to get out and work a little bit in the tin shack's cactus garden, which is this place's main attraction and chief delight. A little bit of work tends to produce great results.

I've spent the last couple of days cutting back some of the desert foxtails, because they tend to take over and crowd out everything else. I'd dig them out, but they're too well rooted, and digging out just one of them messed up my back for half a week. I understand they're a non-native, and it's always those interlopers that seem to thrive obnoxiously.

Other than the unwanted or barely tolerated foxtails, the garden is mostly populated by beautiful beavertail cacti, which are blooming right now and grow very tall (up to ten feet), and the handsome but hazardous Mojave yucca, appropriately nicknamed the Spanish dagger. Freeing the latter from the overgrowth of the ubiquitous foxtail is a dangerous job. Also, I have to work close to the dagger to release my garden from the nefarious grip of a tubular weed whose name I don't know, and which grows large enough to become a tree in which birds nest. It produces a nasty, viscous, milky sap when cut.

Also today, I pulled out the dopey looking artificial sunflowers from an oak tub in the driveway, and transplanted two droopy-looking aloe vera cacti into it. These poor souls were languishing in a shady spot, and getting overwatered by the automatic sprinkler. I shoveled a little sand into the dark dirt already in the tub, and left it in full sunlight, where it will heat up to 120 in the afternoon. I'll never water those aloes; they'll get 14 hours of direct sunlight a day, and they'll love it, and thrive.

Now it's two in the afternoon, and I've communed with the plants, so it's time to walk out in the desert and talk to the animals. The Mojave is bursting with the infant life of newborns right now. Dozens of tiny cottontail bunnies dodge in front of your car whenever you drive down the dirt road, so you have to go slow, and the strings of newborn quail, smaller than ping-pong balls with feet, single file across, following one parent while the other brings up the rear. I suspect this is also the coyotes' whelping time, but I'm not sure. I have a pair of doves nesting in the one of the garden's trees.

You wouldn't think a place like the Mojave could be so full of life. If I can ever figure out how to post pictures on this stupid blog, I'll have plenty to put up.