Too Busy in Tucson

Whew! We have been so busy making orange marmalade there’s been no time to write. Currently we are starting our fourth batch, but I’m taking a break while Dennis shreds the orange peel.

Making marmalade occasioned the need for a jam jar so we turned to our favorite estate sale shop where nice kitchen things cost a pittance. (We have been there so often the owner knows our names.) Sure enough, the perfect jar turned up. Cost: $1.

On the way to the estate sale shop and other destinations we have been observing the re-tiling of the roof of a large, three-story building. For a person who has acrophobia (that’s me) watching the crew casually walking around the roof, carrying and laying tiles was agony. Finally my suffering went away when I saw a lone worker atop the completed roof.

Life hasn’t been all business, though. We found time to have lunch at Wilko again and to walk from there to the Arizona State Museum’s exhibition of a copy of the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays. Walking through the University of Arizona’s campus we came upon an allée lined with old olive trees. But that’s a story for another day.

Back to the marmalade.

  

Copyright 2016 by Shirley Domer

Egg on My Face

Recently I wrote about the ocotillo, an incredibly thorny bush native to the Sonoran Desert. I said that sometimes the ocotillo is used to create a fence, and I assumed that ocotillos would be planted in a row as a sort of hedge.

One of the four agreements is that I try to follow is “Make no assumptions.” Often I fail in that goal. In this case I assumed that living plants would be used as fencing. Today, as Dennis and I were exploring a neighborhood of very old Tucson buildings, we came across some fencing that caught my eye.

Yep, the fence is made of dead ocotillo branches woven together with wire.

Do I have egg on my face? Yes, I do. But I still think a living ocotillo fence would be effective.

Copyright 2016 by Shirley Domer

Tucson's Tohono Chul Park

We visited the 47-acre Tohono Chul Park recently. The park is a mishmash of gardens, a bistro, nature trails, an art gallery, and more.

Wandering through the garden paths amidst plantings of desert flora I was struck once again by Tucsonans’ love of walls.

At an overlook in the park’s gardens above the entrance of one of the hiking trails, for example, one sees rock-walled terraces.

Many walls follow graceful curves, luring one to see what lies beyond.

Inside this walled courtyard are benches where visitors can rest in the shade of ancient ironwood trees. The park provides Internet access there, a seeming necessity in a culture so attuned to electronic media, although it seemed a distraction from the surroundings.

The day was warm, the sky bluer than blue against the white walls of one of the park’s buildings.

It was the perfect day to photograph an ocotillo, an incredibly thorny plant that periodically grows leaves, then drops them. Some people plant ocotillos in a row to form a hedge that would certainly deter any interloper.

This close-up shows the incipient leaf buds.

Next month the ocotillos will produce clusters of firecracker red blooms at the tips of their thorny stems. I imagine those blooms are the ocotillo’s saving grace.

I've barely scratched the surface of showing the Tohono Chul Park, but these are the things that impressed me the most. 

Copyright 2016 by Shirley Domer

Desert Survival Tactics: Trees

Years ago when I first visited Tucson I thought I could never live here because I would miss trees too much. I love the trees surrounding our home in Kansas in every season ­– leaf fall, bare branches silhouetted against a flaming winter sunset, the first hints of green as the earth awakens from its rest, and the shady fullness in high summer. I love it all and I hope to learn to love the desert trees, too.

Now, after living here for three months, I’m just beginning to get acquainted with the Sonoran trees as well as some alien trees in the city itself, such as eucalyptus and the cursed African sumac.

The aliens aside, I’ve found something to admire about the native trees, namely their strategies for survival in an arid environment. The strategy that jumps out at me is their leaves, which are tiny. For example, the native mesquite, which currently is shedding its leaflets in preparation for new growth, has the tiniest leaflets I’ve ever seen.

I’ve never seen the leaves of Arizona’s state tree, the palo verde, but in photos I’ve seen their leaves are equally tiny. This tree is too smart to depend on leaves for its food. The bark and twigs perform most of the palo verde’s photosynthesis, as is clearly evident in their green color.

The tree that has carried this strategy to the limit is Canotia holacanthe, whose leaves are merely tiny scales along its stems, making it virtually a leafless tree. Its smaller branches conduct all of its photosynthesis. We can see why the tree is also called “Crown of Thorns,” even though it isn’t thorny.

The strategy of tiny leaves makes perfect sense for a tree that must conserve water to the utmost. The surface to volume ratio of leaves is high, so that more moisture is lost through large leaves than through tiny ones.  But how did these trees figure that out?

I like to think that trees have intelligence and that they share information with one another. This notion is supported by a German forester, Peter Wholleben, the author of “The Hidden Life of Trees” What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries From a Secret World.” According to a New York Times article about his book, “They can count, learn and remember; nurse sick neighbors; warn each other of danger by sending electrical signals across a fungal network known as the ‘Wood Wide Web’…”*

Who’s to say that the Sonoran trees didn’t hold a think tank and decide to grow little tiny leaves?

*German Forest Ranger Finds That Trees Have Social Networks, Too,” The New York Times, January 29, 2016.

Copyright 2016 by Shirley Domer