If your Snark be a Boojum! For then
You will softly and suddenly vanish away,
And never be heard from again!"
It was at the Boyce Thompson Southwestern Arboretum that I met up with the Boojum tree. Seeing is almost believing. I laughed at the apparition, a tall pole with sticks randomly stuck on. This thing, native to Baja California, was aptly named after a fantasy. It is one.
Mid winter is the time for us northeasterners to escape, if only momentarily, the snow-swept landscape and enjoy the sun and warmth of more southern climes like Arizona. For those of us interested in growing things it is a wild departure from the plants and trees we are familiar with back home in such places as my upstate New York which I thought was Zone 4. We are closer to Canada than to the Big City. I received my new copy of the Thompson & Morgan catalog that placed me in Zone 5. Now that I know, I will revel in this added warmth. Where can I get some Palm Tree seeds?
We visited the Phoenix Botanic Gardens, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in addition to the arboretum, saturating ourselves in what to us was exotic flora. It was the Boyce Thompson Southwest Arboretum that we returned to before leaving for our frigid homeland. Even before entering there is a large display of cacti, succulents and indescribables for sale, tempting you to become their owner. Alas, the majority would not fit in my carry-on bag. Just inside the entrance, however, were innumerable plants that most readily would fit. I chickened out and only purchased some Seguaro seeds. I'm told that this cactus branches after about 75 years.
This small Seguaro will grow larger with a quick click in less than 75 years unless your Internet Server is half asleep just now. For non-natives, the rest of the scenery in the arboretum was almost as wild as the Boojum tree. When I wander through my garden (during the summer), it is among Serviceberry, Viburnum, Cornus, Potentilla and the like. Here in the arboretum everything looks to me as if escaped from another world.
My only cactus (indoors) is a Chamaecereus which I can not get to flower. I also have a Euphorbia, given to me by a son an eon ago. It is now over four feet tall
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