Got to watch this guy packing his midden for the winter. Pretty rowdy little ones! You can see the moment he finally spotted me. This species is critically endangered and endemic to the high forests of the Pinaleño Mountains in SE AZ.
The core of the metamorphic core complex of the Pinaleño Mountains in SE Arizona. Yes, those are Pine Trees 7,000' above the Saguaros down in the desert a few miles away.
In the Pinaleño Mountains, I looked into it a bit, I think it's S. americana f. arizonica. Pretty cool, first time seeing one.
Did you know that the wonderful authors of 'Adenium: Sculptural Elegance, Floral Extravagance' agreed to make a free digital copy available to all?!? We have the link to a complete downloadable version of the book along with other in-depth publications available at:
https://www.dimmittadeniums.net/publications
Just click on the photo of the book or whichever publication you wish to indulge in.
Pretty cool pegmatite with large muscovites and Almadine Garnets. It looks to have had alteration with having been near a major detachment fault. Not sure if it's brittle or ductile but I'm going with brittle.
Walking down the trail I noticed the ground change from lightish grey soils to bright red. I started looking around and found a bunch of breccia and I knew I was standing on the exposure of the Pirate Fault. I gathered some rocks of varying clast size to show the progression from large angular clast to very fine.
This year's seedlings sewn a few months ago.
First time seeing an orange Damselfly, any idea of the species. Found near a spring in Arizona.
Such interesting cotyledons, not showing their first true leaves yet.
The recent monsoon storms had made the upper elevations of the Hauchuchas pretty damp. I'm a botanist by day, so I'm not familiar with most of the taxonomy unfortunately. Here are some cool photos.
A look at Adenium seed production. I made a post earlier about fertilizing if you are interested in seeing what happens before this.
Photo 1: enlarged fruit is bagged and labeled with the parents if the pod was hand pollinated.
Photo 2: Ripe pod just starting to erupt. Self set pod so no cross label.
Photo 3: seeds emerge and are captured in mesh bag.
Photo 4: seeds still with their comae still attached grouped by cross or cultivar.
Photo 5: Seeds with comae removed.
Happy growing everyone!
Huachuca Mts. SE AZ.
Adenium 'Grenadine Splash' a very floriferous crispum x obesum cultivar from Thailand.
More info:
I think this is a juvenile gopher snake, but correct me if I'm wrong. We got lots of rain last night in Tucson AZ, causing the normally dry washes to flood and all sorts of critters coming ashore. You can hear a chorus of Couch's spadefoot Toads in the background as they emerge to breed and lay their eggs.
Long Nosed Snake* sorry I forgot half the name in the title!
Catalina St. Park, AZ.
Found this cool outcrop at the base of Brown Mountain in Avra Valley AZ. The purple rock I believe to be a quartzite and the dike seems to be made up of brecciated material. This is adjacent to the Tucson Mts. Caldera but I haven't seen a magmatic dike with clasts.
Monstrose* sorry autocorrect 😢
You can see the smooth pleating seen on totems.
A new line of hybrids. T. thelegonus x T. 'April Morn'