The Desert Blooms

Even Sin City has green beauty. Not all is concrete and desert although this beautiful flower was blooming right next to the eight and ten lane boulevard known as The Strip in Las Vegas.

Tourism may be down and money may be tighter but the world keeps spinning, for now, and the seasons keep changing and God keeps feeding the birds, counting my hairs and dressing the flowers in greater splendor than a king.

The Green Thumbed Woman

He said to me jealously, "she could jam a plant into the ground, spit on it and produce prize winning tomatoes".

Yep, he said that. He, the owner of countless seed catalogues and hoes and rakes and peat moss and potting soil mixtures. He who built brick walled flower gardens and made circular flower boxes that went around trees. He who worked and sweated and dug and watered and cussed and even spit. Yep, he was bewildered all right.

How does she do it? Why her? She doesn't break a sweat or even write out a plan or draw a landscape! She even knows the names of all those pretty things that grow for her.

One year, he ordered plants guaranteed to grow as a path, in the shade, without much care. Yep, he believed them.

When I finally told him that I talk to my healthy, tall, full weeping willow tree to make it grow and that I would walk underneath it while telling it how pretty it is and running my hands through it's "hair", he didn't believe me. His weeping willow looked more like a sad willow. Yep, he believes the seed sellers but not me and certainly not the spitter!

Well, he never gave up.
I wish he was here to see his final planting. A hanging cherry tree. It's perfect. He would be proud.