Ocotillo Bloom

I apol­o­gize for the length of this post. It actu­ally went much longer, but I already trimmed quite a bit off.

The ocotillo is bloom­ing now, as it reli­ably does every year at this time, whether wet or dry. This pre­dictabil­ity allows hum­ming­birds to fol­low the pro­gres­sive bloom that feeds them on their annual migra­tions north from south­ern Mexico.

This is the first post of a series that I am work­ing on: a scanned field guide to plants along the Tumamoc Road. The project started with a botan­i­cal sketch­ing ses­sion up here in early spring. We were try­ing to iden­tify flow­ers as we drew them, and were hav­ing hard time find­ing the right field guide. So we’ll cre­ate our own.