There aren’t many flower beds here in this desert town. The centers of the main avenues are mostly bare dirt littered with trash and lined with diseased palm trees. But the walled streets, no matter how poor and dirty, have bougainvillea blooming all over them, and flowering trees. There are flowers everywhere here; they just grow up high, not down in moist mulched flowerbeds.

Lilies grow on trees here.

Well, ok, I’m sure they aren’t lilies. But they look like lilies, sort of, don’t they?

And the hibiscus flowers are growing on trees, too! We know Rose of Sharon in Louisiana, and tropical hibiscus that grows in pots, but what are these? Obviously hibiscus flowers, but I’ve never seen any hibiscus with these heart-shaped leaves. And they are trees. I can walk under them.

And oleanders grow like small trees, too, not like the bushy shrubs in the median on I10.

And I have no idea what this might be. Hibiscus, again? Surely not. Look at those leaves. They look like mesquite. Or mimosa.

This? Looks like peas in July–but hanging from a tree. And the flowers are brilliant yellow trumpets.

I don’t have the time to do research about flowers of Torreón, so if anyone has any suggestions for identifying these, please feel free to pitch in. Many of them are probably not native to the area but are very well-adapted and have been thriving here, in my neighborhood at least, for over forty years.

Who needs to toil over flower beds when flowers are growing on trees?