Wildflowers
-
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…
-
Southern Twayblade Orchid (Neottia bifolia)
I have finally given up any pretense of writing in a timely manner here. Or sticking to a frequency schedule. Life is busy, writing time is scarce. Let’s roll back to February of this year when we hiked the Four Notch Loop of the Lone Star Trail up in Sam Houston National Forest, where we did a quick overnight hike to see the southern twayblade orchids. Unfortunately I don’t know when we will be back on the LST or anywhere in Sam Houston because the Forest Supervisor just issued a major closure order for a significant portion of roads and trails in the NF due to historic flooding events in…
-
Swooning Over Plants at Gus Engeling WMA – June 2023
I don’t know if I can express how much I love Gus Engeling WMA. I wish I lived closer to it, though perhaps it wouldn’t be as special? Nah, I think it would and I would probably know its ins and outs a little better. I’m constantly drawn back to thinking about south Florida and how “close” everything was, how driveable within a 1-3 hours a place could be, most places in the 1-2 hr range and many within the 1 hr or less range. Feel like going to the Keys for a long day? Done. More in the mood for interior slow moving creeks and rivers? Done. Dwarf cypress…
-
September Wildflower Walk at Watson Rare Native Plant Preserve
In September we drove over to the Watson Rare Native Plant Preserve to help with the scheduled wildflower walk. The preserve typically holds monthly guided wildflower walks for visitors, with a break in July and sometimes August as well as some of the quieter times such as December-February at the preserve. I had primarily been volunteering on work days and wanted to come out for a bit of a lighter load than a work day—really I just wanted to take some photos and enjoy the blooms instead of doing the never ending task of trimming back ti-ti! It coincided with Chris’ birthday and I didn’t have to twist his arm…
-
Cemetery Botanizing – Roberts Cemetery | 4
I have spent the last week catching up on editing a pile–a PILE–of photos from the last year and even some from our New Mexico trip in June 2022! That doesn’t even count the many photos I had edited months ago that are uploaded to Flickr that I never wrote about. This spring will be the Catch Up Spring. At one point in my blogging days (and for most of us) I would write almost daily but now no one has the time to to sit and read (they are scrolling instead) and so even batching posts and scheduling ahead of time for every day of the week seems excessive.…
-
Large-flowered False Foxglove, Aureolaria grandiflora | Wildflower Wednesday
Bumblebee on large-flowered false foxglove BONAP range iNat Observations Aureolaria grandiflora and it’s Aureolaria cousins have been on my to-see list for quite a while now. Imagine my surprise when Chris found them growing at Watson Rare Native Plant Preserve last July. I wasn’t expecting them to be there but I should have checked iNaturalist and paid more attention. The bumblebee video is from July at Watson. The other photos are from stumbling across the plant alongside the road in the Turkey Creek Unit of the Big Thicket last September. We’d just come off the Turkey Creek Trail and were walking back to the truck when Chris saw them growing…
-
Meeting Nabalus barbatus, barbed rattlesnake root | Wildflower Wednesday
We went camping at Martin Dies Jr State Park in October, and while I had some usual suspects to check out on the trails there, I had a plant in mind I wanted to attempt to scout out in Jasper County—between Jasper and Kirbyville. Nabalus barbatus, aka barbed rattlesnake root, came on my radar a few years ago. It is relatively scattered and uncommon in east Texas as you can see in the map from iNaturalist above. Being uncommon and also trying to make sure I’m in the area at the right time for a bloom, well, it hadn’t worked out for a while to visit. I asked Chris to…
-
Mountain Pinks (Zeltnera beyrichii) at Pedernales Falls State Park
Turns out when you stop blogging and trying to feed things through social media you just stop sharing all of the good stuff you have backlogged. Which means I have many things from the last three years to share, plus I know I do have the tail-end of Alaska in 2019 to share, too. We encountered these mountain pinks on the south side Pedernales Falls State Park, some along CR 201 but the white ones were encountered along the Juniper Ridge Trail in the far southeast section of the park. This was back in June 2021 when we rented a cute AirBnB in Dripping Springs for my birthday. Now revisiting…
-
Roadside Rudbeckias
I have wanted to grow some of our more gregarious Rudbeckia species for several years but it wasn’t until this year, in my small native plant bed inside the deer fence, that I was able to do this. I’m always enamored with how they look when I spot them on roadsides. These were on the road near the Hickory Creek Savannah Unit of the Big Thicket, where the Sundew Trail is located. I spotted them as we were leaving that unit back in May and had Chris pull over so I could take a few photos. I believe these are Rudbeckia texana but there’s also R. maxima and R. grandiflora…
-
May 2023 at the Big Thicket Pitcher Plant Bog
In May, we spent a weekend around the Big Thicket, the same weekend we went to the Solo Tract. There will be several posts from this weekend as I divvy them up and share here. On Saturday evening before we went to the Watson Preserve to do some mothing, we stopped in at the Big Thicket Pitcher Plant bog to eat dinner, drive-thru Whataburger. I don’t think I had been to the bog in the early evening before so it was nice seeing it in a different light, literally. Sarracenia alata, yellow pitcher plants in the Big Thicket’s Pitcher Plant Bog Rhexia lutea, yellow meadow beauty–my favorite of the Rhexia…
