Class and Glass

While we stayed pretty quiet this past week following our busy rally, we did make a trip to Phoenix to visit the Desert Botanical Gardens. The DBG is home to one of the world’s finest and most diverse collections of succulent plants, including rare, threatened and endangered species.

Right now it is also a temporary home to a splendid collection of glass art by Dale Chihuly. We’ll show you a few pictures here. For more of the glass and the cactus, click on any picture and the web album will show up, just like magic. You can scroll around the album, see a slide show, or just ignore the whole thing. To get back here, click on the "Back" arrow on your browser.

We were welcomed to the garden by this display, called Desert Wildflower Towers.

From Desert Botanical Garden

The centerpiece of the entire collection is “The Sun.”

From Desert Botanical Garden

We learned that each piece of this sculpture arrived carefully packed in foam in cartons, to be assembled on site by one of Chihuly’s crew. The pieces are labeled, for example, as “top,” “middle,” or “bottom,” and it is up to the worker to decide where to put it, so that each time it is installed it is unique!

As we traveled through the several sections of the gardens, Chihuly’s glass creations seemed to be everywhere, and like the other tourists, we seemed to be directing our attention to the glass more than to the multitude of God’s green creations.

From Desert Botanical Garden

A half-hour tour (which turned out to be a full hour) led by docent Friendly Phil drew us back to the cactus and other desert plants.

From Desert Botanical Garden

But all in all, it was the glass that entranced us. We are going to have to come back some day to really appreciate the succulents and cactus that are here on display.

From Desert Botanical Garden

From Desert Botanical Garden

After our tour, we stopped in the gift shop and arboretum, purchasing a small Saguaro and an equally small Golden Barrel cactus for our casita lot in Benson. The Landscape Committee will give us instructions on exactly how to plant them.

Then it was picnic time in Papago Park!

From Desert Botanical Garden

The Park actually includes the Desert Botanical Gardens, but this area was set aside for family time, with a soft surface play area featuring desert animal sculptures.

From Desert Botanical Garden

Please do, if you have a few minutes, visit the Web Album. You'll find 63 pictures of some beautiful glass art and some strange and wonderful desert plants. Just click on any picture above, then you can select a slide show, or just march through the pictures on your own. If you choose slide show, you'll want to increase the interval time to at least 5 seconds so you can give the pictures a chance to focus, and you can read the captions! To come back here, click the "Back" arrow on your browser.

Phoenix knows how to have a good time, and we shared it in this day of ... Our Life on Wheels.