Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Where Are All The Saguaro Flowers?

    We have been photographing the flowers and fruits of the saguaro cacti in the Anthem and New River, Arizona area for over 10 years now.  Many of our best pictures of saguaro flowers and their scarlet red fruits are posted on this blog.  Yet something is very different this Spring of 2015 - so many saguaro cacti that in years past were covered with beautiful, cream-colored flowers are totally flowerless this year.  At least half of the cacti we have photographed in past years have no flowers at all on them this year.  Why - we can only speculate.
    Maybe it is just a cycle and this year saguaros just did not produce flowers.  Maybe since the desert in this area received rain in every month since December 2014, that constant rainfall sparked something within the saguaros that didn’t result in flower production.  Maybe the warm temperatures of the past winter somehow prevented the cacti from blooming this year.  We do not know the reason for so few saguaro flowers in this spring of 2015 but we sure do miss them.
    In a year when there were not as many saguaro blooms, here are a few of our 2015 best…

Four, beautiful bloom on the morning of June 9, 2015

The same four blooms now closed on the morning of June 10, 2015


Notice the drop of nectar

This flower is closing after its night of bloom; taken about 10:30am




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1 comment:

  1. Jenn FalconJune 23, 2015 at 3:50 AM

    Hello Linda and Dick, Your blog is one of my "followed" ones. :-) Your flower photos are beautiful. Hopefully they come back! That will probably be hard on the wildlife that depends on them too, especially the bats. (I had one in my apartment here in Massachusetts recently!) When I lived in Arizona, I drew, painted and photographed wildlife. Check them out on my new site: http://falconjenn.wix.com/falconimages

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