[attachment=30328]this is what happens when the desert has rain , not exactly my back door but the edge of town .

Spectacular. Thanks. Very jealous. All I have is a couple feet of snow.

Tom

Hello Jim,
Thank you for sharing this beautiful nature scene with us.
In my neck of the woods everything is white!

I just got back from a Palm Springs weekend. On Saturday we went down to the Anza Borrego Desert State Park, and then Sunday we went to Joshua Tree National Park. Some of the same wild flowers were at Joshua, but many were not and most of the flowers at Joshua Tree were not at Anza Borrego. Anza Borrego is near sea level, while Joshua Tree is between 3,000-5500 feet elevation. The wild flowers were gorgeous!

It dawned on me that I had not been out to the desert since I worked at the Eagle Mountain Iron Mine near Desert Center in the 1970, and since my wife is originally from New York and did not come out here until after we were married in 1973, this was the first time she had been to the desert during the wild flower bloom.

Since we have driven across the desert many times during the rest of the year, but never in Feb. or March, she had never seen the flowers before. She was quite shocked!

My initial thought on seeing the photo was "Oh Lord, that's a heck of a big lawn - thank goodness it isn't grass, and I don't have to hand-mow it!" Second thought was "what a gorgeous sight!"

Yup, this is the season for the wildflowers in the desert. They are especially prolific this year because of all the rain at the end of last year. When we lived in Wickenburg, we had a wash at the back end of our property, and behind that we used to have a wall of yellow wildflowers about this time of the year. Oh, in Arizona, it's illegal to pick them, just as it is illegal to remove a cactus without a permit, even from your own land.

Beautiful picture! Some of the small violets are just beginning to grow here.