Cacti Are Amazing!

The day after going to the natural history museum, Maya had to work but then she had three days off. She was off Saturday, Sunday and Monday. It was a real weekend! On Saturday we went to the Desert Botanical Garden. It’s part of the same complex of parks and public lands that the zoo is. We didn’t know until we got there, but it was the day for the pumpkin festival so the place was packed! Fortunately for those wanting to look at the gardens the pumpkin painting, hey rides and live music were next to the gardens, not inside them.

It’s called a “garden” but that is perhaps stretching things a bit. There are some very garden-like areas with the plants are arranged in rows or in artful clusters, but the majority of the place is more of a desert preserve with the cacti growing willy-nilly across the landscape just as they feel like. This is not a bad thing, we just expected a more formalized and organized look.

There was a main trail that looped through the park, and then themed spurs that shot off of that. The two most interesting spurs were the Sonoran Desert Nature Trail and the Plants and People of the Sonoran Desert Trail. On the nature trail the path led uphill past a dry stream bed to a little lookout area. There was a little shady place and a couple of those coin-op telescopes for looking out at the mountains east of Phoenix. The thing is that they weren’t coin-op, they were just on. There wasn’t even a coin slot. Matt looked at both the Superstition Mountains and Four Peaks. Along this trail we kept a lookout for jack rabbits and cotton tails. They are supposed to be in park. We have looked at about every outside place we’ve been to for there desert rabbits. We would really like to see a truly American rabbit. Pet rabbits are all descended from European rabbits so these desert rabbits would be totally different. We concluded that our odds of catching a glimpse of one are pretty small since these wild animals likely are hiding in a shady spot during the day.

On the plants and people trail, however, we saw some other native life. We saw a little covey of quail trooping along beside of the trail. They were hooting to each other as they went along, dashing from under bushes and between rocks. The educational material along the trail itself featured the different types of plants that different groups of people have collected and cultivated in the Sonoran. The Pima harvested saguaro fruits and cultivated a semi-domestic cotton (which looks really different from the typical cotton plants familiar from the South). They also made use of mesquite forests, both for the wood and for the mesquite beans, which they made into a sweet flour. When the Spanish reached the area (the Sonoran generally, not Phoenix specifically) they added horses and cattle which changed the land use a lot. Also they brought other crops like citrus, pomegranates, olives, and chilies. Most of this information was not new to us, but it is interesting to see the some story of changing human activity told from different points of view – this time from the plants’.

We also paid a little extra to go to the seasonal butterfly exhibit. It was a large aviary-like enclosure for monarchs. They migrate through the area, apparently. We wondered around watching the butterflies eating, sunning, flying, resting, climbing on Matt’s shirt… It was surprising haw large and furry their bodies are. The wings are striking, sure, but the body in the middle is really a massive thing. It would seem they’d have to be a bulky animal to do all that migrating, it just has never occurred to either of us before.

Last of all, we visited the Garden Shop. We made two purchases. Maya found a Vegetarian Southwest cookbook. It has recipes from various high-class restaurants in Arizona and New Mexico. Not only did the products sound good, but the methods are same as the way we cook. Most of the ingredients in the book are raw ingredients. This is not a book of “open these three cans” type recipes. When a dish calls for mole sauce or green chili sauce, it has you make your own! She had sworn off getting any more cookbooks, but this one was irresistible. We also got a cactus garden. Since cacti are the only plants we seem to be able to keep alive long-term (and not ever always then), we’ve decided to get more cacti. The little garden we picked has a golden barrel cactus at the center. That’s a type Matt has been craving since we saw them at the Huntington. He was originally thinking we would just get a largish golden barrel in a pot. The appeal of many different kinds eventually won him over. There is also a fishhook barrel which has red spines instead of gold and an old man cactus which looks like it’s covered in white hair. Cacti are so much fun!