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Country Dirt Road Botanical Finds
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed by email! Thanks for visiting! Gaillardia aestivalis winkleri, white firewheel White firewheel with a nectaring little yellow, Eurema lisa This is a locally uncommon to rare grass, Gymnopogon ambiguus, bearded skeletongrass. I’ve only ever seen it over on the Big Sandy Creek Unit of the Big Thicket. I suspect it may be more common in some of these areas but people generally ignore grasses. Oenothera rhombipetala, fourpoint evening primrose A few weekends ago, Chris took a random dirt road that his GPS said to take to get to the Beaver Slide Trail in the Big Thicket. It…
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Late July at Watson Rare Native Plant Preserve
Geraldine’s cabin, steady through the seasons. Hibiscus aceuleatus, pineland hibiscus Marshallia graminifolia, Grass-leaved Barbara’s buttons A few of some of the Platanthera chapmanii, Chapman’s fringed orchids along the boardwalk Two of the Chapman’s in bloom. Ascelpias rubra The boardwalk down near the pond. When it cools off I’d like to sit down here and read or paint at some point. The beginning of liatris season. Some scenes from a quick trip to the Watson Rare Native Plant Preserve back in July. It was a quick trip but there was quite a bit blooming as you can see. I wrote a different post over on Substack with about similar things that…
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Greenland By Air
In July we went to Iceland for a vacation. On our flight from Keflavík to Chicago we flew over the southern tip of Greenland. I played my hand right when the three of us all decided who would get the window seat during which flight before we left and managed to choose the perfect flight for my position next to the window. Cloud cover quickly obscured the view as we moved inland over the island but I saw enough to be smitten with the icebergs and glaciers I saw, especially having just spent over a week in Iceland. I never wrote about Ecuador from last summer and I don’t know…
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Summer Luna
Actias luna at Watson Rare Native Plant Preserve. July 27, 2025 Fluttering through noon, landing low. Crunching leaves, soft. Off, into the wind.
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Blog Evolutions
Little Pine Island Bayou, Lance Rosier Unit, Big Thicket National Preserve Hello out there! It’s been more than a few months since I’ve written here. This blog has been in fluctuation for at least the last five years as I’ve slowly stopped writing frequently to the point of not writing at all. I’m still writing, just elsewhere. In all honesty, I’m trying to figure out what to do with the blog. It’s time for it to evolve. I’m hesitant to move a lot of it offline because there’s a lot of trip and hiking reports that might be useful to someone doing a google search. And I pilfer through here…
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Finding All the Plants
It’s spring and so I am in my happy space–there are PLANTS BLOOMING AND MORE TO COME! I’ve been out hiking a lot recently, trying to wrap up what remains of trails for my Big Thicket region hiking guidebook, and so I have been seeing a lot of interesting plants and sights recently. I’ve essentially given up on trying to keep this blog to the detail I used to be able to and so this is what you are going to get from me now (this is a note for future me when I get mad at past me for not writing about such and such thing.). My favorite place…
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It all sucks.
I knew it would hurt even worse this time around. But I didn’t expect the visceral gut punch, ripping out of my appendix, cutting off the blood supply to the limbs it would be. It isn’t like everyone who knew what this would be like, including myself, hadn’t warned, and warned, and warned. Somehow enough people memory-holed the first term and thought well, it won’t be so bad for me and decided to toss the rest of us to the oligarchs and fascists and well, here we are. “You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then…
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January 2024 Reads
January started off as a really good month for reading. I set my goal for 40 books again this year, back up from 30 last year. I’m intending to go into this year reading good books and by that I mean by reading books I want to read and especially more fiction. I think I’ve read a bunch of filler books in recent years which have been less appetizing to the reading palate than I thought they would be. I’m going to get back into monthly or quarterly summaries here so I hope those who enjoy reading will also like this! And as always, please share what you are reading.…
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Snow Day
After a week of forecasts for snow, late Monday evening finally arrived and the first inklings of the proposed 2-5″ of snow in our region arrived. The forecast went up and down for days, but mostly stayed in the 2-4″ range for us, though some areas closer to the coast said they would have 6″+. That never really materialized in Texas but it sure did in parts of Louisiana! There were some veritable snow drifts from an internet acquaintance in New Orleans and her kids even managed to have a decent sledding experience on the side of an overpass hill near their house! For us, Forest finally got to use…
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Spiranthes vernalis | Wildflower Wednesday
Years ago, when our front yard was frequently flooding after heavy rain events we had a random Spiranthes orchid show up in the lawn. We hadn’t mown in that area in weeks, maybe months, due to the persistent wet weather that had left ponding in the front yard. Chris managed to clear some of the drains that go under our driveway and our neighbor’s driveway one year and the yard now dries out much better after these events. However, about two years ago we started converting this low lying area in the yard into a more natural swale area, planting bottomland species to diversify and attract wildlife. I hadn’t seen…
