Thursday, February 25, 2021

Where the desert has been made to blossom like a rose...

It's been quite awhile since I've featured one of the black and white plant photos from my extensive collection (thanks to my husband Andrew, who enjoys hunting them down). Some of the photos are so mysterious that I thought maybe I'd try writing a short (back)story to go along with them—sounds like fun don't you think? While I work on that, here's a stereograph card that comes with it's own story...

"Where the desert has been made to blossom like a rose—Salt River Valley, Arizona"

"From the back of the card: "Within a comparatively few years vast stretches of land in the southwestern United States have been transformed by irrigation from desert wastes into beautiful and productive fields and gardens. Without irrigation these acres spread before us would yield but scanty and dwarfed vegetation, limited almost entirely to sagebrush and cacti..."

Desert wastes? But scanty and dwarfed vegetation?! (with a photo of a tall saguaro dwarfing the man standing next to it) Yep, all that the desert needs to make it beautiful is water (sarcasm). Thank god we've (I hope) turned the corner from this way of thinking. A little research about the company behind this stereograph turns up this website (here), which places this one as having been produced between the years of 1900-1910. The Salt River Valley is in central Arizona and contains the Phoenix metropolitan area.

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Weather Diary, Feb 24: Hi 48, Low 34/ Precip 0 

All material © 2009-2021 by Loree Bohl for danger garden. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited and just plain rude.

8 comments:

  1. The irony of the tall Saguaro dwarfing the man then saying without water vegetation would be scanty and dwarfed...

    Which reminds me of program I saw before the wild west was not tamed by cowboys but by federal government installing irrigation and infrastructure. Nice glimpse of the past.

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    1. "scanty and dwarfed vegetation"... oh my

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  2. Ha! The contrast between the photo and and description creates an interesting dichotomy. Very much the same statements were made in the "old days" about regions like the San Fernando Valley (where I grew up), where water was imported via massive irrigation projects given credit for transforming it into a livable area suitable for development on a massive scale. But, until relatively recently, I think many of the people who lived there failed to consider so-call "desert" plants worthy of consideration.

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    1. Yes indeed, desert plants got a bad rep for many years.

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  3. Like wetlands, deserts were wastelands to our predecessors. I cringe thinking of the ecological losses wrought at the hands of men then, and still to this day, unfortunately.

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    1. Yes indeed, we will tame this thing called nature!

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  4. That kind of thinking makes my skin crawl. I hope we've come a long way since then, because it's easy to destroy an ecosystem and a monumental task to correct the damage.
    Do you have an old stereograph to view this old card?

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    1. I do not, it's fun just to treat them as photos.

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