By Spades Washington. Photos by John Washington and Spades Washington. If you haven’t visited the Albuquerque Botanic Garden give it a try, you won’t be disappointed. I recently visited with my family and the botanical gardens exceeded my expectations. The weather was perfect, cool yet sunny and was a perfect day to be outside and […]
The Thorny Bougainvillea
The beautiful-but-thorny bougainvillea is ubiquitous throughout the Southwest, so much so that I almost never notice them. The bright “bracts” (specialized colored leaves) surround and visually overwhelm tiny flowers that are so small as to require magnification to fully appreciate. The always-hard-to-spell (at least for me) name derives from French Navy admiral Louis Antoine de […]
Blossoms of the Ironwood
From any distance farther than ten feet, our ironwood tree has the most unremarkable floral display of any of the flora in the yard. I almost cannot see them at all. But, up close, they are quite beautiful. This shot captures all stages of the flower on a single twig. As it happens, there are […]