Desert Botanical Garden

yes another picture of this, but i love it

flowery goodness

barrel cactus

plant parts

fiona exploring

water fun

look at the needles on that thing

things that desert people eat

grinding mesquite beans

a rabbit

what is in this pot?

on the trail

cocoa 

wool

pearl

The littles and I went to the Desert Botanical Garden today. I just love botanical gardens, my favorite is still the Tucson Botanical Garden, but this comes in a close second. You think that the desert is barren, but there is so much life, such stark beauty. I do love the barrel cactus, they remind me of zafu cushions. I always get an itch to xeriscape after a visit. They have a traveling exhibit going on right now "Design for a Living World". The coolest one, at least to me, was a rug made from the wool of a small herd of sheep. Each hexagon was one sheep,s worth of wool, pretty dang neat. They also had cocoa, salmon skin clothing, bamboo, pearls, latex, wood, and a couple other things.
The kids enjoyed the mesquite bean grinding in the People of the Desert Garden. There were houses, and gardens and some fun hands on stuff for the kids to do. After talking about how important mesquite was to native peoples in this part of the desert we decided it would be sort of cool to get some mesquite flour and cook with it. Maybe this week we will have mesquite pancakes for dinner.
The boys talked about how neat it would be to live like the people did "way back then" and how long they might be able to actually do it. They decided that maybe a week would be enough. LOL They weren't sure if they would want to do all the grinding, but hunting might be fun... that is until they saw the rabbit and thought maybe they would want to hunt something not so cute.