Botanical Gardens Flashlight Tour

You may want to prepare yourself. What I'm about to say may shock you.

I've hardly been on the computer at all for the last FOUR DAYS!! Wow. I know. I can't believe I didn't self-destruct either. But now I'm back and I'm playing catch up.

Last Thursday we took a little trip to the Desert Botanical Garden. I'd never been there before, and since it's so hot right now, we decided to go on the Flashlight Tour, which starts at 7 pm.

The first thing that happens when you get there, is some nice old man gives everyone a mini fan to hang around their necks. Everyone smiles and says "thank you" even though what we really want to do is shake his hand and say "Bless you! Bless you!" Anyway, here's John with his fan, in front of some big ol' barrel cacti (really this is just an excuse to post my favorite pic of John even though it has no story attached to it):



Then you meet in the amphitheatre for a little run down of how it all works. They give you a map of the trail, which shows where the different stations are. It's a self-guided tour so you can go at your own pace, but at each station is someone to explain what you're looking at.

The first station we went to was the Agave station, which apparently is the name of the cactus that looks like this:

I've seen these my whole life and never knew what they were called. Yet, I was so not interested in this station that I didn't even take a picture.

I guess this is a good time to say that I'm not terribly interested in cacti, and thought this whole experience would be good exposure for the kids but boring for me. Did I already say the only reason we decided to do this was because going to a local botanical garden is an activity in John's scout book? No? Oh, well trust me. That was the only reason.

But it turned out this was more fun than I thought it'd be. And I did learn something about the Agave that I thought was cool. There's tons of varieties, and when they bloom, the shoot grows a full six inches a day.

I gotta admit. That's impressive.

On the way to the next station we saw a boy holding this little guy:

It's an albino king snake, named Casper. He even let our boys pet the snake.

Guess what else? I even pet the snake!! (Sorry, no photographic evidence.)

Next was a station I read about on the website before we came, and yet I STILL decided to come: the tarantula station. For any of you who don't know me well, please refer to the definition of hysterical to learn how I react to spiders.

I pretty much decided ahead of time that while my boys would think I was the coolest mom ever for giving them a chance to look at creepy, hairy spiders, I would simply smile and wave at them... from afar.

Again, I surprised myself. I got right up close and got a picture of this (without so much as a shudder):

In the cage is a live tarantula. In the little box is the exoskeleton of one. Like snakes, tarantulas shed their skin, though not as often.

There must have been some magic anti-arachnophobia dust sprinkled around that place, cuz I just thought that was cool!

There were scorpions at this station too. Scorpions = not cool.

The other thing I liked about this station was that a young teenager was in charge of explaning all the facts about the critters here. I thought that must be a great experience, and it set my little mommy wheels a-turnin. I'd love to see my boys do something like that.

In between stations, which wasn't terribly far, there were... you guessed it... lots and lots of cacti. This made me glad we came for an activity which travels maybe only 1/3 of the trails at the garden, and which offers stations to break things up. I just would not be interested enough to walk around and look at nothing but cacti.

But this little part I liked. It was covered to protect these southern Mexico varieties from our Sonoran desert heat - funny huh?

What's up with this one? Look at the growth on top. It looks like... well, I'll let you decide what it looks like:

Next was the snake station. The boy with Casper showed up at this one and was teaching too.

I actually wanted to hold this snake, but only got to pet it.

Then there was the Mesquite station. I really do love trees that look older than rocks and water. Look at the size of this Mesquite tree:

See the sap coming out of the bark?

Native Americans would gather the sap and form it into crystals, which they then used as throat lozenges. (Sorry for the fuzzy picture, but an example of this is in the little box below.)

Saguaro station. This guy was cool. Here, he's demonstrating how to knock down the fruit of a saguaro. (Hint: use big stick.)

According to him, the seeds are messy but yummy:

I don't know if you can tell, but that's a picture of the fruit, and another cut open to show all the black seeds inside. See the cross section of a saguaro on the table? I thought that was cool.

"How big is a saguaro that's one year old?" he asked.

Hold up your hand. Now look at your pinky nail. Now imagine half of your pinky nail:

That's how big a saguaro is when it's one year old. That's also why most saguaro seeds grow up to be food for birds, and only 1/1000 ever grow to maturity.

See all the holes in the saguaro above? Those are made by woodpeckers, and this is what that hole looks like on the inside:

Woodpeckers use it as a nest only once. Other birds tend to move in once the woodpecker is done with it. Also, the woodpeckers put their eggs directly inside this thing (yes, I forgot the technical name, it's not really a "thing") without bringing in any soft material at all. Tough little baby woodpeckers!

This wasn't a station, just a display of sorts: the Cholla Roasting Pit. I like thinking about the daily life of Native Americans who lived here so long ago.

By this time it was getting dark enough to use the flashlights. Here's Ben at the frog station down by the pond:

It made me think of when we saw the frogs in Texas. They were croaking up a storm too.

This is how dark it was:

And this is with my flash:

The interesting thing about this pond is that even though the pond is man-made, they did not bring in the frogs. The frogs just came on their own. The lady said that if we built a pond in our backyard, frogs would come to it. It made me want to build a pond in my backyard.

Except that then we'd have a pond in our backyard. Yuck.

Anyway, here's a pic of one of the big bullfrogs there:

Last stop was the gila monster. I think on the way to this stop, Chris thought we were really going to see a monster, because he said, "I don't like gila monsters." Once I explained what it was, he was fine. I kinda thought a real monster would have been interesting, but this guy was cool too:

I guess he'd had enough of my kids and their flashlights, because he started clawing to get out of the cage.

The lady said she'd never seen him do that before. Take a bow kids. :)

The whole thing took us about an hour and a half, and turned out to be a lot of fun. It's not something I'd want to do over and over again, but I recommend doing it at least once. If you're one of those people who like cacti (hi mom!) then you'd enjoy it even more.