Green-flowered Yeatesia (Yeatesia viridiflora) | Wildflower Wednesday

In mid-November we hiked all of the trails at the Roy E. Larsen Sandyland Sanctuary, something we hadn’t done in several years. It’s on the list of hikes for my book and we’d been at the Watson Preserve the day before for a volunteer work day so we paired the trip with a visit to the REL preserve, too. I love this preserve because it resembles the Florida sandhills quite a bit in the uplands and it is such a unique habitat here in SE Texas. But there’s also a really great bottomland trail adjacent to Village Creek and I also love rambling through that trail. The preserve deserves a bit more off-trail exploration in the future!

While in the bottomlands I kept noticing an odd plant that reminded me of a shrimp plant, Justicia brandegeeana. More closely, though, it was the green shrimp plant, Ruellia blechum, that it reminded me off. I figured since this plant was fairly abundant and the resemblance to those two plants, that this plant had to be invasive or at the very least some newly introduced species that the creek had thrown up on shore over the years during flooding events. Well, I was right on the resemblance, all of them are in the Acanthaceae family, but I was wrong on the introduced species part! This is a fairly uncommon native plant. Though, I do have to wonder about the uncommonness of it given the habitat it is found in—not a lot of folks are hiking in bottomland habitats.

After I put this into iNaturalist when we left, I laughed at myself because sometime earlier this year I’d only become familiar with this species after someone else had logged it and I put it on my mental “To See” list. I must not have committed the plant to memory because I’d forgotten what it looked like and obviously didn’t recognize it while hiking. I took better photos of it with my camera but *heavy sigh* I overwrote the photos last night without realizing it. I just got my laptop back from having repairs done so I was working on putting new photos on it again, and transferred two SD cards onto the computer, separating the photos by folder. But because I’m using two cameras these days the numbering is often identical and I didn’t think about that when I copied the photos over. I’d copied one SD card into the folder and was about to copy another when I thought I was putting the photos in the wrong folder. I cancelled the transfer, then realized I had the right folder, went back and copied and pasted again, this time telling it that it was ok to override the photos because I knew a couple had pasted before I cancelled, thinking I was just over riding what I’d already done, not realizing I was overriding the photos from one of the SD cards. *smacks head* I only figured this out when I went to do the same thing with another natural area and realized my mistake. I went back and saw the good photos I had of the Yeatesia were gone. I don’t know what else I lost. Anyway, that was a long story to say, sorry, I only have phone photos! We’re going to Village Creek State Park this weekend and I know the habitat there, this plant has to be living there as well. I’ll keep my eye out!