Photos and comments from Arizona and around the world
Some of the most impressive water lilies I have seen are on the Mississippi River. This is not one of them, but it it still a stellar example of these lovely floating flowers. I hope to be on the banks of the Mississippi in a few days and maybe the water...
"Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and...
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither...
Perfection in nature is a bugaboo. We have an idealized concept of a "perfect" sunflower and every example in nature fails to conform to our preconceived notion. If I took a thousand pictures of different sunflowers, would I find one closer to the ideal...
Hollyhocks are one of my favorite flowers. When we were very young, we would make hollyhock dolls from a small stick or a toothpick. You pick the flower and turn it stem side up, that makes the skirt. Then you push a sharp thin stick or toothpick up through...
Here is a beautiful example of stalactites, the bigger formations, and soda straws, the thin tubes. One of the mysteries of the world is why both formations exist side by side. What makes one formation grow into a giant carrot shape and the other into...
There have been a large number of forest fires in many states in the West. So far, I haven't seen any of the fires but I did see a helicopter getting water out of a river to dump on a fire somewhere. What I have seen is the miles of burned forests and...
I have noticed that my children choose entirely different colors for the walls of their houses than either my wife or I would choose. Colors have a huge part in our emotions and feelings. The colors we have in our houses often reflect our most basic values...
There is an innate human fascination with falling water. Waterfalls are a total sensory experience with sound, movement and color. They are doubly fascinating to those of us who were raised in the desert where water in any form, is at a premium. I may...
This was a difficult shot. The petroglyph was backlit in the Painted Desert Inn at the Petrified Forest National Park. The rock had been "collected" back in 1934 on Blue Mesa, in the early days of the Park before removing such artifacts became a Federal...
Stalactites are pretty remarkable. They seem to grow organically, but they are produced by individual drops of water evaporating and depositing minute layers of calcium carbonate. The colors come from minerals in the water. It is amazing to me that such...
Big things come in little packages. Sugar Pines are huge trees and have huge cones, but Sequoias are the largest trees in the world and have cones that are relatively small. These are Sequoia cones and are about an inch across. The seeds are only the...
Magnolias are inextricably associated with the Southern United States. The definitely do not grow in Mesa or anyplace in Southern Arizona. These large beautiful flowers would fry in an instant. I have seen large specimens growing as far north as Utah...
One thing I have never had is claustrophobia. I have been in dozens of caves and the only time I ever got concerned was in a cave called Little Muddy in Nevada. I got caught in a crawl space only an inch or so larger than I was and began to panic. Actually,...
This is one of the strangest trees I have ever seen. I first saw these trees in South and Central America where they are fairly common. We called them Monkey Pines because they have curved tail-like branches. The real name is Monkey Puzzle Tree. I found...
I love the shape and texture of pine cones. The photo above give you an impression of the different textures on the forest floor in a beautiful pine forest. What it does not give you is a perspective on the size of the cones. The photo below gives you...
I spent a great number of years cultivating roses. Mesa, Arizona is not the rose capital of the world. It is moderately difficult to grow roses when summer temperatures are close to 120 degrees. The flowers have a tendency to dry up before they fully...
Flowers speak to the eternal nature of the universe and the spiritual side of all that is human, good and beautiful. Evolution without God, can attempt to explain change, but it cannot explain beauty. Why are roses so beautiful? Do you think the pollenizers...
John Wayne starred in a movie called the Yellow Rose of Texas. This is one of the movies I thought was pretty sad and impressive when I was very young. When I have seen it in later years, all I can think of is how fake the Indians looked and why Plains...
When I lived in Central and South America, these lovely red flowering trees were common. I called them Firecracker Trees. It is actually a Ceibo, the national flower of Argentina and Uruguay. In English it is commonly called a Coral Tree or Cockspur Coral...
Despite their aura of mystery and antiquity, petroglyphs are relatively common. It has always amused me that scientists have spent so much time and effort trying to decipher them. If I painted a sign or put my initials on a rock, it would be called graffiti...
heritagerecipes.blogspot.com
I have been in dozens and dozens of caves, some in Arizona and around the U.S. This is a recent picture in the California Caverns, likely the first major cave discovered in California. The thin formations hanging from the ceiling are called soda straws....
This photo shows the contrast between light and dark. Some of the most commonplace views have the greatest potential for contrast, texture and design. Here you can see the edge of the salt desert. If you were to keep going north, you would soon reach...
I couldn't resist posting another peacock. This is a white peacock. Both peacock photos have the same problem, a shadow of the photographer. Here, with a lot of effort, the shadow could have been removed, but what is more important in taking photos is...
