Some days, when I get off track, I just stare at my surroundings. Luckily today, scarlet globemallow came out in my courtyard. I water almost nothing here. I do throw yesterday’s left over water from Cooper’s bowl on the autumn sage. It keeps the red blossoms coming and the hummingbirds too. Some days the other birds get the left over water. The New Mexico locust gets dishwater. That’s it. They grow slowly, but the Arizona ash, the New Mexico olive, the Apache plume, the Mongolian whatever it is, the lilac and the rest seem to do fine on their own. In spring, I get blackfoot daisies without encouragement. Purple asters in the fall. Penstemons at random. I have a new sunflower that showed up last year. Always, there are the piñons and junipers, and the piñons are slowing coming back from the 2003 die off. The slope down to my house has been a carpet of yellow Fendler bladderpods for the past several weeks. There is enough outside that I have just one plant inside — a Christmas cactus that I douse with unfinished drinking water once a week but otherwise don’t nurture. It blooms every Christmas and serves as my Christmas tree. I really am not any kind of landscaper at all. Just lucky and blessed with sight.
P.S. I should note that trees that I started, like the ash, the locust, the New Mexico olives and the Mongoloian thingamajig, got supplemental water at least in their first year. I have had about 50-50 luck transplanting native piñons and the big problems here might be over-watering and wind. And I’m afraid a piñon seedling given to me by Manny Aragon, via the state Forestry, didn’t make it. I tried.
dream ranch 