Set out in my Ford Ranger on Saturday afternoon to explore a gargantuan plant nursery. It’s the far northwestern part of the Las Vegas Valley, and I had to make another stop so it took me a while to get there. But the Waze app is generally a reliable navigator so the Ranger and I found it.
The nursery, Moon Valley, has acres and acres and acres of trees and plants and shrubs. Full-size trees from a zillion or so palm trees to the Southern live oak to the red oak to the fruitless olive to the jacaranda to the standard and generally boring russet plum blossom to a tree I’m semi-interested in, the Australian bottle tree. The latter is very drought-tolerant. And since the West is in a megadrought, well …
It was another windy day in the desert. Strong winds had ripped through earlier and some of the heavy trees were lying sideways. A man puttered by on his Kubota tractor with a load of lemon bottle-brush plants. He later came back with a slender clasplike tool and lined up every plant. And the nursery was crawling with sales people. They were at the front entrance. They were roving around in golf carts. They were everywhere.
One guy quoted me a price on a good-size Australian bottle tree. The tree is $900, planting is complimentary, but the delivery fee is $250. Plus Nevada sales tax, which is about 8 percent in Clark County.
“So about a thousand dollars,” the sales person said.
I snickered. “You better get out your calculator.”
“Huh?”
“Well nine hundred plus two-fifty plus Nevada state sales tax is going to be well north of a thousand bucks.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I guess.”
And you say you do this for a living?
He disappeared into a grove of leafy red oak, and I never saw him again.
Anyway, I saw what I wanted to see and got a feel for some large-scale trees for the yard. I had made the mistake of wearing street shoes and of course this was a plant nursery with generous amounts of water and mud. D’oh. I’ll be better prepared next time.
But it also had some intriguing outdoor decorative art:
I was going to ask someone what exactly it was and whether or not it was a direct descendant from T. rex and how much they wanted for it. But by then, the sales people had all vamoosed.
On the way back home, I spied a Tractor Supply Co. store. Didn’t even know there was one in Las Vegas. (In fact, there are two. I looked it up.)
It was located in a spiffy strip mall near a Coldwell Banker realty office.
So I popped in to take a look around. It’s officially a hardware store but is well-stocked with agricultural and livestock supplies. While I was meandering, I heard a “cheep cheep cheep” sound.
Couldn’t place it, and I seriously thought it was some kind of an animatronic sound from a display.
Then I heard it again. “Cheep cheep cheep.” What the hey?
This time, I ferreted it out. They had a slew of tiny yellow ducklings gathered under heat lamps in oval-shaped metal tubs.
The ducklings were all huddled together for warmth or support or maybe it was a domestic thing. “Cheep cheep cheep.”
Gotta wonder who buys ducklings and what the ducklings’ long-term survival rate is.
I’m guessing the giant creature above has much greater longevity.
Regardless, it was an interesting few hours tromping around in the mud, and the pedometer app on my phone liked the results: 10,700 steps or 4.59 walking miles for the day.
