Gardening in the high desert climate is a challenge. Yucca Valley area is in the 8B hardiness zone. I have gardened in Zone 9-10 which has been a breeze compared to 8B zone. I haven't had much luck with vegetable gardening. The weather and the critters have made the effort a failure. Still one can continue to try and see what is possible and not. Gardening is like witnessing alchemy in action. The constant transformation of plant life appears to me as magic unfolding. The various fruit trees I planted the year before and largely watered with recycled gray water answered back in spring with lovely blossoms. Almond tree blossoms, plum tree blossoms and peach tree blossoms are delicate and stunning. And the bees show up in droves feasting on the flowers and other creatures also visit.
Aliens are here.
This young grasshopper
lived underneath the
persimmon tree leaves.
The moth visitor.
Almond tree blossoms in the high desert. The strong high desert wind caused almost all the petals fall so only couple almonds fruited and the birds got them early before the nuts fully matured.
“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”
~Iris Murdoch
Be mad with joy? Iris Murdoch must have adored flowers. A video I made featuring my sister and the beauty of flowers.
Peach tree blossoms after being planted into the ground the year before.
Ta da...magic! The peaches were very sweet...
the birds and squirrels enjoyed most of them.
Comice
I think of Issa often these days, his poems about the loneliness of fleas, watermelons becoming frogs to escape from thieves. Moon in solstice, snowfall under the earth, I dream of a pure life.
Issa said of his child, she smoothes the wrinkles from my
heart. Yes, it's a dewdrop world. Inside the pear, there's a paradise we
will never know, our only hint the sweetness of its taste.
~Joseph Stroud (California poet)