Plants among us

And, yes, Z, with more pictures:

Took this picture at a nursery (viveros) nearby. And, yep, that's a poinsettia--the same as the ones you see in pots every Christmas, and I'm standing as tall as I possibly can. We have a couple of these trees in our garden and some of the leaves are just beginning to turn red. When I saw the picture, it reminded me of the first time I saw these plants grown so tall.  It was in Baguio about 1982, the first time we went up there.  Curious, I looked up the elevation of Baguio--5000 ft, just like here. Hmm, I wonder about their respective latitudes: Baguio, 16.4 N; Ajijic, 20.3 N.  Hadn't really thought about it before, but that explains the similar climates, of course. (I'm really fighting the nerdy geographic urge to go on and find more places of similar latitude and altitude.......Later!!) There is a picture in a box in the garage in Louisville similar to this one with several of our 1982 selves standing under a large poinsettia tree just like this one.

The other day we went to a place we'd heard about for years about halfway between here and San Juan Cosala.  It's called Viveros Cactus, and it's a Biosphere, a beautiful garden of about 2 acres or so where they cultivate various kinds of cactus, some really exotic.

It's really hard to get a sense of how spread out this biosfera really is, but here are some pictures for examples:

I'm making up names for these because I don't know the real names.  I call the one above graveyard cactus. Or maybe just Tombstones. The one below is obviously an octopus cactus:

Below are twisted sister and pots o'cactus.  I'll let you figure out which is which:

Ok.  Hope you enjoyed my little slide show.  It gets boring uploading all these pictures.  Maybe I'll just load them somewhere else and put a link in next time.  Especially for the house and garden pictures which we have tons of.  The last cactus is really named barrel cactus--I think.  If it's not, it should be: