“I had to get out of Los Angeles,” said Quinn, a poetic songwriter who describes his sound as a cowboy waltz vibe meshing with tinklings of sci-fi. I had to choose this musician to accompany today’s photographs for the description of his music alone. You tell me if his assessment is accurate….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RhMnmovEKg

And where did he go? To Joshua Tree National Park, a haven for fringe and not so fringe musicians, stoner rock mostly, made most (in)famous by the Eagles of Death Metal, who lost band members in the terror attacks at Bataclan, the Paris night club.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-desert-music-joshua-tree-20151205-story.html

The title of the article above describes the park as drawing artists, musicians and the pure of heart. None of those were present when my oldest friend and I explored it in 2015 – we had the entire place practically to ourselves in the early morning. She has a passion for cacti – no clue where it originated. Perhaps comforting visits with grandparents – cacti collections were not unknown to be decorating German window sills.

I certainly know that my passion for birds was instilled by walks through the forests and heaths of Lower-Saxony with my Opa, the thin, short man playing the huge stand-up bass in a small Orchestra called Fidelio. He’d whistle bird calls with the joy of a musician and taught me the rudiments about bird species. Here is a hummer in memory of Opa Eduard.

But I digress. Cacti it shall be today, in all their comforting beauty. And their bloom in the wild.

Photographs from Joshua Tree National Park and the region surrounding Palm Desert. The park’s trees, rarely found any where else in the continental US, look like some sort of cactus themselves.