-
Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve | A Photo Tour
I thought I’d finish up the posts from Glacier Bay with a photo tour. There won’t be a lot of writing (if any) but do sit and enjoy the photos!
-
Watson Native Plant Preserve | Part I
Posts from 2011: Part I, Part II, and Part III—I’ve noticed a few mis-identifications on those old posts and need to go back and fix them. Small-Flower Pawpaw, Asimina parviflora We arrived to Watson Preserve mid-morning before the heat started setting in. And honestly, as I’m writing this two weeks later, it is much hotter and more humid now than it was then. Someone pulled in not long after we arrived, an older couple, who asked if we’d visited before. They didn’t stay long and I don’t even know that they saw the back part of the preserve with the bog! We started off on the boardwalk that eventually winds…
-
Lauren’s Grape Poppy | Flower Friday
Several years ago now we had a great bloom of Lauren’s Grape Poppy in the flower garden. I’ve always wanted to recreate that year but have never been successful. This year a single poppy came up, I think from seeds I dispersed last year, and proceeded to put on blooms! It was so beautiful and reminded me of why I love this particular variety so much. I believe it comes true from saved seed so I will be saving what seed we get this year and sowing them again next year! Maybe I’ll get the large flush of blooms I was hoping for again.
-
The Pitcher Plant Trail | Big Thicket National Preserve
Things are quite heavy in the US at the moment. I have thoughts, of course, but I’m going to sit on them a few more days and hopefully incorporate them into my usual monthly Life Lately posts later this weekend. For now we will re-wind back to two weeks ago when we visited the Pitcher Plant Bog in the Big Thicket. I have a lot of posts coming in the next week because I edited a bunch of photos, so hold tight! Southern Leopard Frog, Lithobates sphenocephalus I hadn’t been out to the Pitcher Plant Bog since December of 2013. It was right before I got pregnant with Forest and…
-
Variegated Fritillary (Euptoieta claudia) caterpillar | Wildlife Wednesday
A few weeks ago I was deep into one of the edible perimeter beds by the blackberries, weeding. I’ve let a small crop of native violets grow in there because they are edible and also pretty. I’ve been transplanting some of the ones that crop up in other parts of the garden to the flower garden but the deer come and browse on those which is another reason I keep the ones tucked inside the edible garden. I noticed a caterpillar. It resembled a gulf frittilary but those munch on passiflora vines. I took a few phone photos and then went to grab my dSLR and reverse macro lens and…
-
Late May in the Garden
Yesterday I spent the majority of the day moving a load of mulch and doing various gardening tidying activities. I had wanted to move this particular load of mulch back in March after we moved a different load of mulch but then everything shut down and that didn’t happen. I was getting tired of weeds appearing in many of the unmulched areas over the last two months so I asked Chris to get another load for me now that things are open again. I’m only disappointed that it did not come with a couple of kolaches for breakfast from Kolache Factory as it typically did in the Before Times. Such…
-
Zebra Swallowtail Caterpillar (Eurytides marcellus) | Wildlife Wednesday
Our trip to east Texas last weekend had us visiting the Watson Rare Native Plant Preserve and two Big Thicket National Preserve units, the Turkey Creek Unit (and the Pitcher Plant Trail) and the Hickory Creek Savannah Unit (and the Sundew Trail). I can’t recall where we saw the first zebra swallowtail adult fly by but we did end up seeing several along the Sundew Trail. One of them was flying slow and low to the ground, which at first had us thinking it was searching for nectar plants. But it avoided several flowering plants and I finally decided it was looking for pawpaws to lay eggs! From then Chris…
-
A Quick Trip to Kleb Woods
Last Friday Forest and I ventured out for our first drive-thru food since this pandemic started. Chris had a field job south of town and took the opportunity of being so close to Galveston to get some fishing in after the field work was done. That meant he was not going to be home for dinner. When this typically happens, Forest and I will go and get food, maybe do a Target or craft store run after, and then head home. Or sub the Target/craft store for a trip to the playground. Since our usual habits are very much altered these days we waited in the drive-thru and took our…
-
Scattered T-Storms (or) The State of Things Around Here
Big Thicket National Preserve Pitcher Plant Bog I didn’t mean to go dormant over here this week. I had another post drafted called The Depths of Despair, where I was going to quote Anne Shirley after she found out Marilla Cuthbert didn’t want an orphan girl for Green Gables. Anne’s despondent and dramatic depths of despair is often how I’ve felt for the last few weeks and last week I was feeling it a bit harder. I scrapped that post but here I am to catch up a bit. As the title suggests, there are scattered thunderstorms around today. Thunder is rumbling in the distance and Forest is rolling around…
-
Trapped by Water at Great Egret’s Ridge Day Use Area | Trinity River National Wildlife Refuge
Our last stop on this Trinity River NWR tour was only a few miles away from the Knobby Knees Trail. If you look at the map you can see how the two trails get very near each other far back towards the river. Green Anole, Anolis carolinensis A whirlpool caused by the water rushing through the culvert under the levee we were walking on. Forest was enamored by this when I pointed it out to him because he had just begun creating his own little whirlpools in the paddling pool we have in the backyard. This trail started off promising, despite being surrounded by deep water on both sides of…