When the driest places in the country drink in the annual spring rains, the result is kaleidoscopic.
Across the US, February and March are the months of the desert bloom, when long awaited rains coax flowers from the seemingly barren earth. Barrel,beavertail, hedgehog and cholla cactus erupt in pink, yellow, and palest white. Creosotebush, ocotillo, fiddleneck and lupine burst out yellow, orange, and brightest blue. And all across the landscape a thin veneer of green is showing- a fleeting and colorful reminder
that life thrives in even the most ‘barren’ of places.

Learn the science behind predicting desert blooms. If you’re lucky enough to be in Arizona any time soon, take a desert bloom walk.

Image source

In late September, I moved into a new apartment in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood that came with an garden overrun with Morning Glories (pictured above). It was wild chaos, and like all chaos it was beautiful. Except that, buried underneath that green umbrella, I found several plants on their last leg cut off from light, air, water. My first task was a serious clear out that ended with me surrounded by bags and bags of the fighting Morning Glories.

Now, we are well into February, which has been downright balmy in New York. The few bulbs I got down in October and some other unknown surprises from tenants-past are already responding to those few degrees of warmth by pushing their way up through the soil.

I’ve spent the winter with my other hobbies of video games and comic books, but I’m looking forward to replacing the former with long hours out in the backyard.

I literally can’t wait to see what else lies beneath as the weeks continue into spring.  Yes, we’re just over 20 days out, but I’m jumping out of my seat with anticipation!

“Somehow these E. woodii survived the catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs, got through five different ice ages, learned to live with bigger, newer trees, conifers, leaf bearers, then a profusion of fruiting and flowering plants, got pushed into smaller, then even smaller spaces until there were merely tens of thousands, then thousands, then hundreds and then, perhaps, just this one.”

Read this today. Truly great story by RadioLab’s Robert Krulwich.

The orchid has long been a flower of fanatical popularity: they’re colorful, suggestive, and tantalizingly diverse.  In Victorian England, where orchid collecting first reached the frenzied heights of obsession, the resulting condition was known as ‘orchidelirium’. The wealthy constructed specialized greenhouses, and hired teams of botanists to comb the globe for the rarest, most magnificent specimens. Orchid hunters faced a whole manner of tribulations on their quest: some were eaten by cannibals, others by tigers, and a particularly unlucky few were murdered by competing collectors.

The precious cargo they came back with wasn’t always beautiful, either. Bulbophyllum phalenopsis, for example, reeks of rotten flesh, and the blossom of Drakaea lividia, commonly known as the warty hammer orchid, looks like a lump of blackened, hairy earwax. Borneo’s Grammatophyllum orchids resemble a swirl of alien tentacles, and can weigh half a ton.  More than a couple of collectors met their ends crushed beneath the orchid while trying to remove it from the rainforest canopy.

There are 20,000 named species of orchids in the world, and together they make up one of the largest and most highly evolved families in the flowering plants. For those wanting to feast on the orchid’s voluminous diversity sans flesh eating tribesman, the New York Botanical Garden’s orchid show opens March 3^rd, while Longwood Garden in Pennsylvannia holds one through March 25^th. For one of the largest orchid shows in the USA, check out San Francisco’s Pacific Orchid Expo. It’s just around the corner on February 25^th.

Paper cut images from Virginia Rose Kane

A corpse flower by any other name would smell so sweet… It doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

Amorphophallus titanium or corpse plant or corpse flower as they are often called, is certainly one of the strangest plants on earth and not exactly the kind of thing to give a Valentine.

Native to the tropical jungles of Sumatra, the corpse flower, or corpse plant, has the unusual adaptation of mimicking a carcass. It achieves this by producing a heady aroma of rotting meat and by way of the fleshy design of its dramatic bloom – colored with deep reds, purple and vermillion. The corpse flower’s carcass-like smell and appearance help to lure pollinating insects.

As if that wasn’t weird enough, the corpse flower is enormous, reaching heights of 10 feet, resembling a sort of real-life version plant-turned-monster from The Little Shop of Horrors – owing to it anthropomorphic grandeur. But the comparisons end there: the corpse flower is not a carnivorous plant. It does however alter the common perception of a delicate, diminutive, faintly sweet-smelling flower, and show how miraculous nature’s evolutionary incarnations can be.

Images by Jody Rogac