Dead Flowers

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Take a snap of some of the latest blossoms and blooms near you. If for some reason it's still too chilly where you are, one, you my sympathy, and two, go ahead and use a picture from your archives. But everyone else should go out and take a fresh picture if they can.

Oh, this is so not the year for flowers in Tucson! Remember that rare Tucson snowfall I was going on about in January? I loved it, but it was devastating to a lot of the plants around here. Here's the bougainvillea in front of our house as of last summer:


But here's the same plant in January 2007, right after the snowfall:


And here it is as of today: dead, dead, dead. There aren't even any buds or tiny new leaves to offer hope of the plant's survival:


Similarly, there's an office building at Fifth and Wilmot where I've photographed flowers before. Last summer it was positively lush:



But look at it now:


Yes, one of the palo verde trees is in bloom. But look at the brown bushes. Bougainvilleas, I think. Dead, or nearly so.

One more. Back at the house, we have a firecracker bush, a kind of hummingbird plant (which is to say, a plant whose tiny, bright flowers attract hummingbirds). It's grown and spread considerably over the last decade, even poking runners under the yellow wall John built. But this, too, was covered in snow in January:


It's not dead, but it hasn't exactly recovered, either.


Personally, I don't mind the dead flowers. I'm just not a flower person; in fact, I'm allergic. I'm sure people and companies around here will replant, and maybe next year the right weather at the right time will produce a lush crop of spring flowers. But it's all one to me.

Still, if you like flowers, I hope you have lots of really nice ones to enjoy, like John Scalzi's extraordinary cherry blossoms. Happy Spring!

Karen