The White Trees Are In Bloom!

My mom was running errands in Downtown Mesa just now and she reports that the white trees are in bloom! Hurray! I've been waiting anxiously over a week for them to pop out! The entire tree is spectacularly white! Totally! No green shows at all. Most of them are by the Mesa Public Library. It lasts about ten days, and as the white trees start to fade, the pink trees begin to bloom. There are hot pink trees and regular pink trees. We cannot find as many of these, but there are some on University Drive near Stapley Drive. When they quit, we start looking for the orchid trees. Entire trees with these beautiful flowers covering them!

The citrus trees blossom, marking the start of the new citrus season. Trouble is, the trees often have last year's fruit all over when the new blossoms come in. My mom is always waiting just a little longer for the grapefruit to get sweet. Now, you and I know that the grapefruit is never going to get sweet. It's just not in the nature of grapefruit to have any sweetness at all. They're going to be sour and nasty no matter how long they hang on the tree! But my mom has a great imagination when it comes to grapefruit. So there'll be a tree loaded with blossoms, and also fully ripened fruit. Same with my lemon tree. I don't actually use lemons, but there's this huge lemon tree in the back yard of my other house, and it grows these Ponderosa Lemons, but no one picks them. I had a neighbor that liked them, but he died a few years ago, so there they sit. With new lemon blossoms.

The sour oranges grow in abundance. Nobody eats them, but they look pretty on the trees. We have them down the middle of Main Street, and also in the parking lot at the temple. They make for nice photo ops.

When the citrus trees end, it's not long before the jacaranda trees turn purple, and the mimosa trees are not far behind. Plus, the bottle brush trees and the bottle brush bushes. They're red.

We'll have a few weeks of winter interspersed here and there between the bloomings. Just because it's 80 degrees in January doesn't mean that winter is over. But the winter weeks are few and far between, and meanwhile we enjoy the lovely blooming trees and bushes. It's all part of what makes Arizona such a spectacular place to live!