Yayyy! It’s wintertime and everything is in bloom.
Well, not everything, but a lot of stuff that prefers cool weather to the blast-furnace effect of a globally warmed Sonoran desert. Roses, for example, are very fond of winter here…
The big lavender plant that would like to shove the Myer lemon tree out of its way has recovered from its fall haircut, it having wearied during the summer. It will stay in bloom all winter, all spring, and through most of the summer.
The bougainvillea doesn’t much care what time of year it is: as long as we avoid a freeze, it blooms all year round. Right now it’s pretty vigorous.
Something—probably burr clover, not dichondra—is struggling back to life between the flagstones in back. Gerardo hollered at me because he thought I wasn’t watering enough. But I don’t think that was the problem. It acts more like pearl mites, a rugged little parasite that devastates lawns in these parts. Right now it’s cool enough to drive them dormant, and so the walk-on-me plants between the stones are coming back to life.
The bush peas I put in a few weeks ago are blossoming, and here’s our first baby pea pod! Yum.
Several other veggies are thriving. Ready now: the Swiss chard: 
No need for Christmas decorations around here. The orange trees come with their own ornaments:
Over the weekend, Cassie and I hung out in the front courtyard, where I read endless pages of copy about medieval and Renaissance history and she took the afternoon air, watched hummingbirds, and barked in harmony with Biker Boob’s yapping pit bull:
So it goes. Like Dilsey, summer or winter, hard times or good, some things endure.
Oh my, you sure know how to tantalize us from the Frozen North. Yeah, it’s about 2 degrees F here and I am looking at spring in Arizona (sniffle). Actually I grew up in SoCal so your picture of the orange tree snapped me right back into the Christmas spirit when Christmas morning breakfast would begin with us running out to the orange trees to get the fixin’s for juice. If was warm enough (80 say, instead of 70) we would go surfing on our new boards after all the festivities. Enjoy your spring (she said somewhat enviously) and thanks for the fabulous pictures.
LOL! It’s never too late (or too soon) to move to Arizona. We’ve got lots of cheap real estate here! 😉
Don’t think I haven’t thought about a move to the Sun…but alas, Stuck in Vermont till the kidlet gets out of high school. Then we will talk! 13 degrees this morning, so we are, ahem, warming a bit.
How lovely to see blooms when, even here in West Texas, there’s snow on the ground.