In most places, winter is the non-growing season. Not so in Phoenix. Its true that many trees are losing or have lost their leaves and some kinds of grass are brown for a few months but almost everything around my house is still growing.
This is an agave plant. It has been growing new leaves in the center ever since we planted it and it’s growing as fast as ever during the shortest days of the year.
This is honey suckle. It’s not in bloom yet, but you can see a bunch of buds in this picture.
This is a variegated vine. I don’t know much more about it than that. I don’t know whether it ever blooms, but it does have new growth.
This is the bud of a bougainvillea plant. It really is worth clicking the picture to get a better view. I got lucky on this picture.
This picture is really good too. You can even see little hairs growing on the bougainvillea flowers. They start out green and turn white.
Tamara’s Fern has new growth on it.
The Yellow Bird of Paradise is actually blooming, but this picture only shows buds.
The Mexican Bird of Paradise has new red leave on it. They turn green as they mature.
The lemon leaves also start red & go green.
This is an Aloe Vera bud. Or maybe it’s the blossom. This plant hasn’t bloomed since I’ve lived here, so I’m not sure.
We also have cute little baby Aloe Vera plants.
This is new growth (FINALLY!) on our Star Jasmine vine growing on the über-ugly mailbox post. Well, it’s wrapped around it anyway. We hope it will grow onto it and hide the ugliness that is our mailbox.
These pansies definitely think this is Spring time.
The orange trumpet vine just blooms whenever it wants.
And finally, after we thought they might die, (and most of the plants did) the snap dragons decided to bloom one more time. The other snap dragons didn’t die of wintery coldness. I drowned them. On accident. Several times.
I didn’t even take pictures of the Lobelia or the Lantana that we have blooming right now. 
This is my Swiss Chard. Yum! Most of the plants look something like this medium colored red chard. They, at least, are supposed to grow in wintery weather.
This picture shows the dark chard on the right and the green chard in the middle. On the left is some nasturtium, which most people do not believe is a kind of chard at all. It hasn’t bloomed yet, but when it does, I will eat the flowers in a salad.
These might be daisies. I planted lots of Shasta Daisy seeds from my wedding throughout the chard garden, but I had never grown daisies before and I didn’t know what they were going to look like. So I let all the dandelions get really big just in case they turned out to be daisies. When I was fully sure that they really were dandelions, I finally pulled them. It more than decimated the garden!
All along I had been pulling anything that sprouted with really round leaves. I was sure that the daisies would not start off with round leaves because mature daisies have long leaves and the seeds were long and skinny. Well, these plants that I expect to turn out to be daisies have two round leaves under the long leaves, which means that the very first two leaves to pop out of the soil were round. I may have killed more daisies than have survived just because I didn’t know what they looked like. And I’m still not sure I’ve identified them correctly yet.
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