While the iris which was purchased as Coyote Ugly, and is blooming completely out of season, might actually not be Coyote Ugly since it doesn’t seem to have “rosey-peach petals splashed and speckled with violet and raspberry, accented by bright tangerine beards” as per catalogue, the now open flowers have attracted a bright green predator. Patiently waiting.
The bees and a myriad other winged garden roommates, however, are elsewhere: burying themselves in similarly coloured cups of saffron crocus blooms.
Saffron harvest has begun.
The yield of precious threads is not huge and pollinators still visit the crocus patch after I have pulled the stigma.
On a random late afternoon drive out into the desert yesterday, to charge the battery in Janis truck, I found an old hot sauce bottle just lying there amongst broken glass and rusted, bullet scarred tins on the side of the road.
Online research seems to indicate that this style of hot sauce bottle dates from around the 1890s to 1930s.
What was it doing there in the middle of nowhere, near nothing, beyond just waiting for a hundred years, for me to find it?
Cleaned up, it makes a fine container to display a few late season zinnia flowers, joining lavender flowers and sorghum harvests drying in other old bottles which have found their way into my life.
I found the information on the Society for Historical Archaeology website in a section about food bottles . This week’s gift from the mystery of the desert looks exactly like the bottle pictured and described above, left.
Hot sauce.
Comments