Garden Notes

Desert flowers blooming at Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum

In early March this year, we vacationed in the southwestern United States, mainly to see sunshine and leave all the snow behind. It had been a long, gray and cold winter and we were more than ready for a change. One of the states we spent time in this year was Arizona.

When we travel, I like to stop to view gardens, especially those in different climates. This year while traveling in Arizona we stopped and spent a good part of our day at the Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum. Here we learned about the many plants that manage to live and thrive in such a dry climate. The desert museum is a unique experience. It combines a zoo, an aquarium, gardens, a museum and a gallery all focused on the Sonoran Desert. Located on a 21 acre site, it has 2 miles of walking paths and over 1200 plants.

We learned that much of the Sonoran Desert has bi-seasonal rainfall: with winter storms from the North Pacific bringing gentle rain and summer ‘monsoon rains’ from the Gulf of California bringing wet, tropical air and violent thunderstorms. This amount of rainfall causes the Sonoran Desert to be considered lush when compared with the other North American deserts and it supports over 2000 species of plants.

Since we live in Wisconsin, most of the year we are surrounded by grass, flowers, trees and birds. When we arrived in Arizona, at first all I could see was desert. I didn’t recognize most of the plants and the landscape just looked forbidding and desolate to me. Our visit to the Sonoran Desert Museum changed all that. It helped me awaken to the beauty of the desert and made the rest of the trip more enjoyable.

Desert garden with gila monster, flowers and cactus