Desert Roses

It's cold and grey, and the ground froze overnight after yesterday's snow thawed creating some lovely slicks of ice first thing for the seventy-pluses to slide across. So it's a day for memories of warmer climes and, specifically, of two roses, not your hybrid teas or floribundas but two that are at home in hot, dry desert regions.

The first rose is Adenium obesum. It's native to Africa, the Middle East and Madagascar. It has pretty, shades-of-bright-pink flowers which would grace any garden but what makes it so special is that it grows in arid areas where few garden flowers could hope to survive.

The desert rose is able to exist in such conditions because it's a succulent, with a broad, swollen, base that is partially buried under the ground and which stores moisture for the dry season. This 'caudex' produces twisted, almost leafless, gray-green to brown branches which can be up nine feet tall. 

We found this particular beauty in the Saadani National Park in Tanzania, growing amongst grasses which were dead from want of rain. It provided a wonderful explosion of colour in an otherwise desiccated landscape.

However beautiful it may be, and however happy it made us to find it, it doesn't compare with....

....these spectacular natural crystals of gypsum, also called desert rose, part of a naturally-occurring crystalline structure found within sand dunes in the Sahara desert. The structure from which these pieces came can be....

....very large, witness this specimen from the Tunisian Sahara.

Tunisian crystals courtesy Wikipedia.