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The palo brea logo

• Admin user
• July 26, 2025
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First, thank you to everyone who has been kind enough to write me about the website and blog. I’ve had a few questions about my logo/ page-loader (shout-out to JJ at Designzhub 360 for helping to turn it into a gif for the latter!).

The logo is meant to be a palo brea blossom unfolding. In the Sonoran desert we have several green-barked trees called palo-something – the “blue” palo verde (Cercidium floridum/ Parkinsonia floridum), the foohills, or littleleaf palo verde (Cercidium microphylla/ Parkinsonia microphylla), and the palo brea (Parkinsonia praecox/ Cercidium praecox). A deciding factor in buying my house was the presence of two giant trees – one palo brea and one palo verde – which shade much of my garden. There is at least another blog coming, maybe many, about shade. As my neighbor and fellow plant freak Logan Phillips advised me early on – ignore planting instructions that specify full sun: they don’t mean our sun.

July 2025. Palo brea on the left, palo verde center.

I love both of these trees inordinately. But. One morning during our first monsoon together in 2022 I opened the kitchen door and – at first I had no idea what I was looking at. My whole porch, both the north and west sides, were full of – tree. A giant branch had broken off the palo verde in the night. Of course all my tools were in the screened porch on the other side of the tree. I had to use kitchen shears to cut a hole so Chivita and I could climb through. Then hire someone to come and chainsaw the thing and haul it away.

July, 2022

Monsoon 2023: I lost several more big boughs, one of which shattered pots and broke plants. But at least those I could break down myself, and drag out.

Monsoon 2024: again. And by this point a lot of the rest of the garden was filling in, and the wreckage from the fallen boughs (along with a vicious hailstorm) was sort of heartbreaking. This time my friend and colleague Mario Castillo Rocha (CR Affordable Services[1]) quite delicately got most of it out without further trampling. Amazing. So when they tell you, if they tell you – let me tell you – that the palo verde “sheds” limbs, it is no joke.

Meanwhile the canopy of my gorgeous palo brea had spread to over fifty feet across. Glorious. And not a single branch has ever dropped. But.

The palo brea in bloom, April 2025

One morning not long after that hailstorm extravaganza, I was standing around with my coffee, as I do, surveying the morning garden, and I realized that the palo brea had leaned – leaned far enough to nudge the dish of the birdbath off its stand. I got Bartlett Tree Experts in, and they strategically installed an adjustable support pole under one of the main limbs and thinned out a third of the tree – and it was still gorgeous!

And they really lopped out a ton of weight from the palo verde. That poor tree looked like a Dr. Seuss character, but a year later it’s filling out again, and I’m praying my way through another monsoon season

Same view in April 2025

In the spring Tucson is gowned in yellow. The blue palo verde has a brilliant lemon yellow blossom, but the littleleaf has one white banner petal – so from afar the littleleaf palo verde looks creamier than the blue. The palo brea has dots of orange on the yellow banner petal, but this year a strange thing happened to mine: the whole banner petal was orange. I have searched this, but so far I’ve found nothing to enlighten me.

I will not go on and on about palo taxonomy. I love them all. I love it that they are legumes (Fabaceae) so they are busy fixing nitrogen in my soil. I love it that they can lose all their leaves in a drought and still process chlorophyll with their green bark. But I have to say: I have come to love the palo brea best. Covered with frilly pairs of pinnate leaflets, she looks like she’s wearing a fluffy green party gown. She changes into taxi yellow for the spring ball, but she looks fabulous all year. She wears bird jewelry day and night, so she’s a little loud, but she is generous – every spring she shares her yellow clothes with everyone around. And when that girl throws shade, the pattern looks like a wicker basket.

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[1] You can find CR Affordable Services on Thumbtack, but don’t believe the description of what they do – they can do so much more. Mario and co. have helped me build my own patio and ramada-pergola thing, and install complete landscape designs.