The view beyond The Tropical Paradise

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One of the great joys of living here in Glendale, Arizona, is the beautiful, intensely blue sky. I grew up in Minnesota, land of "sky blue waters", so I just love the blue sky. And as much as I like Los Angeles, it just doesn't get blue skies like this, except in postcards.

This is the view from The Tropical Paradise looking north by northeast. The trees in the distance are a Jacaranda, a Cottonwood, two desert pines (they grow well here in Glendale, but they really don't do much for me), and a couple of Washingtonia Robusta (Mexican fan) palms between them. Many people consider these to be a "weed palm", and they are very, very common here in the Phoenix area. They do grow like weeds, including starting in the cracks of sidewalks, etc. and they get to be upwards to 80 feet tall in no time. They look great from a distance, or along a boulevard (those are the type of palm trees that you see on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, by the way!), but on my small property, they would just be "telephone poles". They fall into the category of a "fan palm", and I describe them as looking a bit like a toilet-brush cleaner, to differentiate them from feather palms, which look more like a big feather duster. Feather palms would be species of Phoenix, for example

The Jacaranda, at far left, has beautiful purple tropical flowers in the spring, but it is also too big of a tree for my property, so I admire them at a distance. The leaves of a cottonwood makes a wonderful fluttering sound, as you know, and The Tropical Paradise is usually so quiet that I can enjoy the sound even from this distance. But, this tree is much too big for me, and it is deciduous, that is, it loses its leaves in the winter, so it's not for me. And, of course, it sends out its little bits of "cotton", which is nice in a large, more natural, property, but can be messy here in the suburbs.

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