Las Vegas, NV

What if I could use that slope to my advantage? What if I could skateboard down Las Vegas?

I put the thought away for a while, and found myself in a Southeast Las Vegas cactus greenhouse a few months later.

"How are your pachys doing," Mrs. Turner said.  She's referring to my pachypodiums, baobob-like succulents from Africa, which I purchased from her a few years back.  I didn't have the heart to tell her.  They were all dead.  But I think that's what keeps drawing me back.  The Turner Greenhouse in Southeast Las Vegas is one of those wonderful places that has no signs, no flair.  Just a few greenhouses and an impecabble grounds, and a wonderfully odd assortment of plants.

She says, "oh, that's right, you're that zone 10 couple."  What she means is that where we live, we can't kill anything we grow, because the weather is perfect. 

It wasn't until the seventh or eighth time I dragged my wife to the Turner Greenhouse that I really began to think of Las Vegas as a place that never really gets written about. America's sunniest city is America's unwritten city.