The desert may seem like the last place you’d expect to find beautiful flowers and flora. The main reason we came to Phoenix was to visit their world famous Desert Botanical Gardens. It’s home to thousands of species of cacti, trees and flowers from all around the world but it specialises in local desert species of wildflowers and succulents.
The garden covers 140 acres of land and is divided into special area of significance – wildflowers, Sonoran Desert plants, herbs and other desert plants. We could have spent all day here but we thought that we had a seen a good sample of the gardens by lunchtime and we had only seen about one half of the gardens area,
The have many temporary exhibits of art at one of the standing exhibits is a butterfly house. We were able to see a collection of butterflies that are active in Spring.
We walked along some of the trails to see any species of cactus. Unfortunately, we were a week or so too early to see some of the flowers in full bloom. However the plants in the garden had very interesting colours and textures.
One of the English couple that we had met in Taos suggested that we should visit a place called Cave Creek when we visited Phoenix. She found it hard to describe, and so do we. It was roughly on our way north to our next overnight stop so we made a quick detour to have a look.
Not only we did we see our first cowboy on horseback, we saw that the long main street consisted of a collection of stores that sold metal art works. They were amazing (and very large). I have no idea who might buy this stuff but it looked as though these stores had enough stock to last for a decade.
We reached the town of Sedona by mid afternoon and decided to extend our stay here by one night. It didn’t make sense for us to follow our original open of staying here for just one night and then moving 60 kilometre up the road to Flagstaff for another night. We look forward to exploring the area tomorrow.
Wow, a real cowboy, did he have pistols too?