Tucson, 2025

David and I drove to Tucson last month to visit friends.  The weather was perfect, balmy in the daytime and cool at night, blue, blue skies with beautiful clouds.  J and I share a mutual interest in miniatures, and so one of the first things on our list was The Mini Time Machine museum, which was great fun, and I even spotted a couple of our other interests, petit point and bobbin lace --

And of course because a souvenir from the shop would be a pleasant reminder of our trip, I bought this lovely little hand-blown glass vase, one of a display by Emilio Santini (who apparently does not have a website, even in Italian, but contributed a very long and esoteric post to a blog about the life and times of 17th-century glassmaker Antonio Neri) --

After that it was all saguaros, all the time.  (Just kidding, of course ... but there are lots of saguaros.  Everywhere.)  We first visited the Tohono Chul botanical gardens (including the bistro for a rather amazing lunch), and the next day Saguaro National Park, which has a bit of a self-guided walking tour but for the most part was driving ourselves to various look-out points along the 8-mile/12km scenic loop.

I learned two interesting things about saguaros, one because I was curious and just happened to be browsing a children's book about them in the national park's shop, that the "ring" around some, that looks like it has been tied at one or more times in its life, is caused by extremely cold weather, and the other from our friends, when we remarked on the number of times we saw a young saguaro under a palo verde tree, which is a "nursery" of sorts -- the palo verde is the nurse tree -- because the tree provides shade and shelter for the young saguaro.  As the saguaro grows, it takes more and more of the water and nutrients from the soil, which eventually causes the tree to die, although with the very slow growth rate of the saguaro, this is presumably some years later.

It was a good trip, although very dry, but it was good to hang out with our friends, seeing their new-to-us house and their favorite saguaro sights, but also just to hang out.  J and I had another adventure on the last day, which I will write about in another post ....

Comments

[dawninnl]

Thanks for an interesting post. I didn't know anything about saguaros other than what they looked like. And that wee precious vase, love it. I've started reading Emilio's post, because it's esoteric, of course. It may take me a while ;).