My Spring Wildflowers

As I 've explained previously, I do two kinds of gardening on my Prescott hillside. For bright, colorful annuals and a few perennials that want Real Soil, it's pots. For plantings in the ground, local wildflowers, many of which are quite spectacular.

For example, the most prolific Indian paint brush I've ever seen! Pictured above, the plant on April 18, just beginning to flower. This is the end of May; it is still adding more blossoms, and this without a host plant (paint brush are semi-parasites.) I'm sure the secret to my wonderous paint brush is that it gets regular watering.

The bright reds of this plant are not actual blossoms, but, rather, modified leaves surrounding the working parts.

Pink. Fuschia. Red. Purple. Almost blue. And, I've heard, an occasional yellow. Those are the colors of upland Arizona penstemons. I've counted eight species that grow in the greater Prescott area, but perhaps the most outstanding is Palmer's penstemon. In a good year (meaning early spring rains), this pink beauty grows flower stalks up to 6 feet tall. Do peer into the throat of a blossom. See the guide lines for insects and that cool yellow beard?

The leaves give evidence that this is a plant for arid country. Not only are they somewhat waxy, but they are arranged down the stem to deliver what little water falls directly to the roots. Look for Palmer's penstemon out the Iron Springs Road, beside the road to Granite Basin or along the White Spar through the Prietas.

This penstemon is a spectabilis, I believe. Not a Prescott plant, but found higher up in the mountains. Doubtless a purchase from Flagstaff Native Plant/Seed.

The last of my earliest penstemon -- psuedospectabilis or Arizona penstemon, another plant for arid country. The best local site for this plant is way out the Dosie Pit Road. These samples surely explain why British plant breeders adapted the penstemon into a really smashing cultivated garden favorite here and abroad!

Too bad that the desert four o'clock opens so late in the day, as it is another very attractive plant. I came in close on the flowers to show the bracts from which a daily blossom emerges. Only one seed per flower, but many blossoms -- and, given enough water, most of the seeds will sprout. This plant was grown from a neighborhood seed, BTW.

Coral bells were a perennial staple of my gardens back in Chicago; it turns out that they are also Arizona mountain natives! Though I paid good money to Watters for this plant, I did discover a small clump of white coral bells in a shaded rock outcropping along Mint Wash below the Granite Basin dam.

This is one of my own New Mexico locusts. Pretty flowers, but nasty thorns. New shrubs keep coming up from very long underground runners. However, I have a problem with a myriad of nasty juice-sucking critters that attach to the stems and kill them. Maybe the city is simply the wrong location for this locust!

Pretty little claret cup cactuses are mountain plants, adapted to elevations as high as 7000 ft. This means that, unlike most cactus, they are tough little guys who can survive winter snows, as can prickly pears.

Here is my great disappointment. A fine specimen of bear grass -- but instead of a proper, tall flower stalk, my plant grew a crooked stem that hugged the ground. I've no idea why this is so!

And another admission of incompetence: I am totally unable to grow a sacred datura from seed. I have tried in pots. I have tried in the ground. Up the hill. Down by the road. No success. Bought this seedling at, you guessed it, Flagstaff Native Plants. Should have bought several. More garden wildflowers later, as they bloom.