blossom week: day 2

In honor of their last day in our backyard, today I share with you three surprising blooms.

Texas sage is everywhere here in Phoenix and is most often shaped to "perfection". It's a pity because when you let the branches grow naturally, they sprout out pretty little purple flowers, exuberantly after generous rains. We have roughly 15 of these guys in our yard and I think they were planted back in 1988 when the house was built. They've suffered from all the taming over the years, and some of them are just way too big for the space. We'll have to find another way to bring purple into the yard, because it's just so pretty.

Miniscule rosemary flowers - the bees LOVE them.

And Indian Hawthorne. This shrub is hidden behind a sprawling rosemary bush. It's too bad because it survived our exceptionally cold winter like a trooper and is blooming like crazy right now. I'd ask the landscapers to extract it intact so I can plant it elsewhere in the yard but it's a whole lot bigger than I remembered.