My husband took this photo of our saguaro with his iphone. It’s amazing to watch the changes the season brings to a saguaro. Here’s a growth chart that I found to guess the age of this saguaro in our backyard. It has its first arm and is taller than 15 to 16 feet, so I bet it’s 100 years old or older.

Here’s another photo my husband took:

The birds are loving the flowers! The flowers look like the inside of a pomegranate. Before the flowers turned red, the blossoms were white and looked like crowns. Here’s a photo when the saguaro began to bloom.

The saguaro with more blossoms. Unbelievable how they turned red!

Here are saguaros I took with my iphone from across the pool, while writing my morning pages. I thought this would give some perspective of how majestic and tall they are.

Did I mention birds? Yes, the birds are always landing on the saguaro and have also built nests inside. You can see the holes in the saguaro in the photo above that have had nests and baby birds. Once a bird abandons a next, another bird may move in.

A White Winged Dove enjoying the view.

A Curve-Billed thrasher on a saguaro before it bloomed.

Two much water can kill saguaros and with our last gardener we lost three. Over watering can cause root rot and collapse. Saguaros have accordion-like ribs and a stem succulent that allows them to store hundreds of gallons of water during rainfall. As more water gets stored, the skin of the saguaro starts to expand to make room for more storage.

To be fair to the gardener we had, two saguaros were over-watered and fell on their own. One was rescued and it survived, one died. Two others were infected with some sort of disease.

We hired a cactus doctor who inspected all our cacti and told us to remove the two diseased ones or it could spread to others. Then we were told before you can remove saguaros you have to get a permit from the county! We had a knock on the door and a county inspector arrived. The cactus doctor had called him. After we got the permit, we were told to hire a crew to remove the saguaro. After the entire ordeal, my husband thought he could have handled it on his own. However, there were two men taking down the saguaro. If my husband decided to do it — I would not volunteer for the chain saw — nor making sure the saguaro fell in the right place by holding a rope around it.

What an ordeal. We didn’t know much about saguaros when we moved here, but we are learning!

What are some special native plants where you live?