Wildflowers
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Gaillardia aestivalis var. winkleri | Texas Native Plant Week
I have to admit, I’m a huge fan of Gaillardia. Commonly it is known as Indian blanket or fire wheel however, I like to refer to it by its genus. This genus is relatively hands off in regards to fussiness; plant it and it thrives. You may see the more commong Gaillardia pulchella or aristata and even aestivalis, but other varieties such as this one are more rare. This particular species is endemic to southeast Texas—only. Here are a couple of interesting links in regards to its history. In our garden we, like always, had to fend off the deer and hope for the best. When the plants were finally…
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Calyptocarpus vialis | Texas Native Plant Week
Horseherb, aka: straggler daisy, is an interesting kinda-sorta native plant. You see, we have some *in* our flower garden from a pot that we bought, and where we bought it from called it native. It wasn’t long after we bought it that I actually paid attention to the grass around my yard and noticed that the same plant grew throughout the yard, intermingled with the grass and other weeds. It had been on my mind for awhile to check the plant out online and follow-up with digging more information on it, and finally a few weeks ago I actually looked it up. I had a suspicion that perhaps it wasn’t…
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Echinacea purpurea | Texas Native Plant Week
The purple coneflower, Echinacea purpurea, has been a tricky plant to grow in my garden. The deer love it! I don’t know how many times it has been chowed down on by those feisty rascals, but it took all summer and just in the past few weeks have the bloom stalks survived being eaten long enough to actually produce a bloom. We started these plants from seeds that I received from my mom. Pass along seeds and plants are the best as they always have some sort of story or memory attached to them. It probably would have helped if we hadn’t planted the flowers front and center along the…
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Bidens laevis | Texas Native Plant Week
A couple of weeks ago I was on the Native Plant Society of Texas webpage and somehow came across Texas Native Plant Week. The Texas legislature signed the week into law in 2009 and this week for praising Texas native plants has been going on now for several years. I’m sure there are events associated with this week, however I thought it would be fun to cover native plants in my yard and garden currently growing over the next seven days. I’ve got a great list of them and this week we’re going to start with Bidens laevis. Last year was our first autumn in this house and that’s of…
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Overly Excited About The Wrong Plant
We were driving down a two lane, very rural road in central Arkansas having just left Petit Jean State Park and Chris was intent on finding either Lilium superbum/Turks cap lily or Lilium mixhauxii/Carolina lily. I had a vague idea of what they looked like, lily-like you know, but having not recently seen a photo I had no idea for sure. So, here we are driving along and looking at farm after farm with very tiny towns interspersed in between looking in roadside ditches as we got 60mph down the road. We slowed a couple of times for trumpet creeper and orange daylilies to get a better look only to…
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Afternoon at Lost Maples | Late Spring
Over Memorial Day weekend we headed off towards the Texas Hill Country west of San Antonio to do a little exploring. Our original intentions were to hit up Government Canyon State Natural Area since we always seemed to drive past it for other parks further west. Well, the weather decided not to play nice that weekend. Only days before we had been planning on kayaking along the Guadalupe River but a call to an outfitter and checking the river levels online revealed the river was a bit dry for running the river where we were planning. Then storms came through two days in a row causing flooding. Then there was…
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Texas Wildflowers | Clematis texensis
First we were into passiflora (still are), but now we’ve found clematis! This is another game of once you see one plant you start seeing them everywhere! These were shot at Lost Maples State Natural Area in November. +Information via the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. They say blooming time is March through July….well, November is quite outside of that window so I don’t know it if was a freak of nature or what for them to be blooming at that time of year. +There are some cultivars of this species apparently, Duchess of Albany, Princess Diana, Gravetye Beauty were a couple I saw online.
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Texas Wildflowers | Maurandella antirrhiniflora
How ’bout those pearly whites, there? Chris had heard about snapdragon vines before and I *think* maybe we have seen them at a nursery or something, but we were walking the trails at Lost Maples State Natural Area a couple of months ago when Chris bent down to check out a plant that he thought could be the snapdragon vine. Well, all it took was verifying that it was indeed the plant for us to realize that it was *everywhere*. Funny how plants blend right in and pop out at the right moment only to be seen everywhere you look. A pretty interesting native, don’t you think? +Information from the…
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Salvia lyrata | Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center
Salvia is one of those plants in which I could have a bed of many varieties and species…much like passiflora, brugmansia/datura, tomatoes, and probably too many other plants to name. I’ll take one of each please! Take in the spring of 2012.
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Asclepias asperula | Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center
I may or may not be still working through photos I took in Austin last spring. Yeah…. I love milkweeds not only because of their host food abilities for monarch caterpillars but because they are just a beautiful native plant to grow. A great Texas milkweed website for reference.