Walk with me ~ Scottsdale Desert Botanical Garden
While staying with a friend in Scottsdale, Arizona, I visited the Desert Botanical Garden. If you like cacti and agave, it is a great place to spend a few hours.
The specimens are beautiful and some are quite big. Since it's in a desert, it's completely different than any other botanical garden I have seen.
There are big broad pathways through the rugged terrain and garden.
The winding path takes us between these small hills, below.
You can see that it was late afternoon and closing in on golden hour.
At one point, I was surprised to see that I wasn't alone!
The big cacti are saguaros. There is a Saguaro National Park not too far from here. These particular cacti will reach 40' (12 m) in height and don't get their first branches until they are about 80 years old. Needless to say, they are a protected species. They grow only in the Sonoran Desert which covers parts of California, Arizona, and the state of Sonora, Mexico.
The surrounding area is more or less flat with a few prominent mountains smack in the middle. You get a sense of it in this photo, above. There are some good hiking trails on the mountains.
You may have noticed that some paths are made of brick.
I think the big plant, below, is an agave.
References
Images
Photos from @kansuze's old Kodak DC210 Plus at Desert Botanical Garden, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA
I hope you enjoyed the walk!
@kansuze
Great photos!
Beautiful cacti.
I really liked the photo where the gopher looks from the mink!
He obviously did not buy a ticket to visit the Batanic Garden!
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Thank you!
I've never been to Arizona and those botanical gardens that I've visited so far were indeed different - all green, vibrant and lush. This one looks very special to me.
Was it very hot when you visited it? It looks like it.. I've never seen such big cactus's but I've never been to a desert either so this could be the reason :)
Looks like you had a nice excursion. Thank you for sharing it with us!
Have a lovely day!
I visited in April and I was at the gardens later in the day so it wasn't really hot, but in Phoenix and Scottsdale I pretty much went from an air-conditioned house to an air-conditioned car to an air-conditioned restaurant, even at that time of year.
All the biggies!
I have been to Arizona, but not to where the saguaros were. I'd love to go back at this time of year, before things get too intense.
Those agave are all over here as landscape plants that put up with our intense summers. We call them century plants.