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Cemetery Botanizing – Cartwright Cemetery | 1
Small skullcap, Scutellaria parvula Possibly bare-bottom sunburst lichen, Xanthomendoza weberi Carolina anemone, Anemone caroliniana Common blue violet, Viola sororia Southern bluet, Houstonia micrantha Early buttercup, Ranunculus fasicularis I’m not sure why I haven’t though to do this before but I got the idea from several botanists and naturalists who do this on social media: they go to old cemeteries to look for plants! A lot of times the cemeteries are somewhat neglected or at least frequently mown short which in turn promotes the growth of species that like that type of attention. Sometimes they are rare plants that can’t be found many places due to habitat loss. I typically frequent…
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Does Texas actually care about its land? The Pending Loss of Fairfield Lake State Park
Sometime in the fall I started a Substack newsletter where I was hoping to focus my writing efforts on Texas nature and environmental writing. I was going to re-purpose some blog posts here but also work on focusing on other important environmental news efforts in the state. It was a different kind of writing than what I typically share here, which is sometimes rambling and a lot more personal. The Substack was a way for me to stretch my writing skills and write for a different audience. If you haven’t heard of Substack, it’s a newsletter platform that allows writers to be paid if they want, so you can write…
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Heart’s A Bustin’ on Valentine’s Day
I totally meant to actually schedule this post and write something more formal but I forgot I had even drafted this to begin with! Euonymus americanus, also known as strawberry bush or hearts-a-bustin’, is a really cool native shrub that comes over into east Texas. Unfortunately it is also known as Deer Candy so it isn’t something we really really grow, though I do have one in a pot on the potting bench that I am hoping to possibly grow in my perimeter bed in the edible garden once we get that finalized (someday). But, I hope your heart’s are a bustin with love for someone, or at least for…
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January 2023 Books
Alright, time for January’s book roundup! I read 8 books this month! I’ll break down which is audio, kindle, and paper. Audiobooks did a lot of heavy lifting as per usual and I think you want to add in more reading to your life, an audiobook is the way to go. 1: Playing God in the Meadow by Martha Leb Molnar – Kindle I enjoyed this book but was frustrated with the author at several points along the way. The author and her husband have bought a property in Vermont and in front of their house is a huge former apple orchard that has fallen into disrepair due to disease.…
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Eagle Watching
We get bald eagles on our pond every year around this time. In fact, when my parents arrived to visit after Christmas, one had landed at the shoreline behind our house and stunned and thrilled them to see. My dad managed to get an iPhone photo but I missed the chance to get a photo with my camera as it had flown away by the time I went in to get it. The birds have been around here a lot lately and so yesterday morning I spent some time sitting on the dock trying to get some photos. I got some decent photos but nothing to send to a bird…
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1SE – January 2023
I’ve known about the One Second Everyday App for several years now. I think I even tried it back when I had my old iPhone but could never get into a routine with taking the photos/videos. An internet friend has been using it to document her new baby and I thought I would give it a whirl this year. The good thing is you can import photos and if you use the Live photo mode it makes those photos a short video which really helps with having the 1-1.5 second clips needed to make this video. I’m not good with taking a video every day but I can manage a…
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Engulfed in Fungus – Attack of the Akanthomyces sp.
Forget COVID-19, it’s fungi we should be worried about! We stumbled across this moth covered in a fungus in Angelina National Forest last October and I knew it was one of the cordyceps family fungi as soon as I saw it, though I couldn’t quite place the name at the time. I had seen several people post their own photos of insects parasitized by this fungus or a related species in the few months prior and just never thought I’d stumble across my own sighting. So, the fun thing about these fungi is that once they parasitize their host, they cover the body with this weird growth so that it…
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Insects Lurking About
One of my favorite things to do when I have the time while hiking is to move slowly and see what insects and arachnids may be lurking about on a plant. There’s a good chance one is hiding in plain sight, like this American nursery web spider, Pisuarina mira. Common boneset, Eupatorium perfoliatum, the perfect haunt for that spider as it waits for insects to come nectar! This unassuming goldenrod looks devoid of faunal life but… you would be wrong. I’m unsure which bee this is and I may not ever get an answer because I only have the one photo, but it may be one of the leaf cutter…
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Christian Point Trail at Everglades National Park (2007)
Looking back through some of these photos I wondered why I didn’t bother editing some of them. I had completed a small handful but had left a decent amount untouched for over a decade it seems. And it made me wonder why we didn’t make the effort to go into Everglades NP more often, though I know the reason why—you had to pay to go in! Big Cypress and so many other areas were free, and though we did pay for a state park pass, the pass let us in to a lot of parks and the ENP pass didn’t. That said, it isn’t like I wasn’t spending 5 days…
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Life Lately | January 2023
It’s been quite a while since I’ve done one of these so I thought I would get back into the habit. I do like looking back at old ones to see what I was thinking at the time and they are fun to laugh at! Lots of gifs in this one because, why not? Thinking: About perimenopause. Yeah. Fun subject to talk about, right?! via GIPHY About 6 or so years ago I followed a crafting newsletter and she was in her very early 40s at the time and she would mention perimenopause from time to time. I didn’t really pay much attention to it because in my head, and…
