Heavy rains this week combined with beautiful weather today made it a perfect time to get out in the garden. I’ve been pulling weeds fairly easily from the moist soil, pruning old plant parts, and playing in the dirt. I’ve also been playing with a new camera, but so far it and I are not seeing eye to eye, as it were. Alas.

Being out in the garden meant I got to see many new buds already emerging, and thoughts of pollinators and early blooming plants were on my mind.

But first I’ve got to show off something I’m super-thrilled about — the Lime Prickly Ash lives! It dropped its leaves for the winter and then the dogs knocked it completely out of the ground (mom was not a happy camper). Fortunately, it was crazy cold that day and I was able to get it back in the ground fairly quickly, hoping desperately that the little guy was fully dormant. Well, thank goodness — the leaves, they be a’coming! We have extra boulders now surrounding the Prickly Ash — hopefully the dogs will heed the barrier.

Last year was the year of minimal gardening for me. The drought made me extra wary of stressing my young natives by pruning and encouraging root growth when no water was to be had. This year, we’ve fortunately had a bit of rain, and it’s time to take care of overdue matters, like the Texas Lantana:

As you can see, it needs it! The Texas Lantana in the butterfly garden had become rather unruly, and little plants were able to grow under the woody branches whether I wanted them to or not. In the case of little Cedar Elm saplings or the unknown type of aggressive bush sage that I’ve been trying to get rid of, it’s not a good thing to have a woody barrier blocking your way to them. You can see lots of henbit below, as well. However, as I pruned back the Lantana and pulled out unwanted other things, I made a happy discovery:

Ten little Goldenrods! These will one day blossom into golden gems that are pollinator paradises. My first Goldenrod was wildlife-planted about two years ago (in the Lantana, of course). Last year one became three. And now I’ve got ten little ones that I will move into more appropriate spots. Here’s what they’ll look like one day (that’s the mama plant):

I’ve also got a few veggies planted — broccoli, snow peas, spinach. The herbs out there right now are for the Black Swallowtails. I didn’t see many of these gorgeous butterflies last year due to the drought, so I want to have plenty to feed the caterpillars in hopes that they (and we) will all have a better year. And so I have several different kinds of dill, parsley, and fennel — if I need a little for cooking, I’ll take it, but otherwise these herbs are all for the caterpillars.

Buds on many trees and little seedlings in the ground are sprouting. We are having a rather warm winter, so I worry that a hard freeze will have an ill effect, but I’ll do what I can to help them.

Here’s a sample of the Gregg’s Mistflower seedlings popping up all over their bed. In other beds, I’m getting to play the “Name That Seedling” game.  I did see Standing Cypress and Purple Coneflower, a few Poppies, and maybe even a Gayfeather. There are other plants that will just have to grow bigger and maybe even bloom before I’ll be able to ID them. That’s the fun of spreading an assortment of seeds around — you don’t know what’s going to germinate!

And then there’s the henbit. I have a decent tolerance for this annual, despite it being a non-native that spreads like mad. But it’s a source of nectar for early pollinators when sometimes there’s not much else around, and it is sooooooo easy to pull out from the ground thanks to its shallow roots. So I take out henbit where I want but leave some in the wild areas for the pollinators. Once other plants are blooming, the henbit might be in more trouble.

On this pleasant day, the birds have been busy as always, and out in the garden I was joined by little butterflies, little bees, little flies, and one little caterpillar, a Gulf Fritillary. I’m going to have to tackle its Passionvine soon — the vine climbed into the nearby redbud last year and wants to do so again. The little Mexican Redbud is already about to bloom — I want it to be its own tree again, free from anything trying to strangle it!

And lastly, I’m happy to see that the Pomegranate has its leaves emerging. We had no fruit last year, but it is still a young tree. Last year, its second year since we planted it, was clearly a growth year for the tree — it grew taller than our roof! We’re crossing our fingers (again) that we’ll get fruit this year — I by gosh want to make Pomegranate Guacamole!

I’m glad to be back outside and I’m ever so grateful for the occasional rain we’ve had. It’s so satisfying to be able to prep the beds and get them ready for new growth, new blooms, and maybe even a few new plants to fill the gaps — we’re eager to welcome more emerging pollinators!

Sometimes it’s better not to know what lies behind Door Window Number 3.

I’ve been wondering what my Gulf Fritillary caterpillars would do once they finished off every leaf on the Passionvine. Would they eat the stem in desperation? Would they pack their bags and move out in search of more Passionvine? Would they curl up and die (oh no!)? Would they knock on the door and beg me to go find more leaves?

With not a leaf left to be found on the Passionvine, the caterpillars had to make a choice. Take a look — the caterpillar above has started to strip the vine itself. Fortunately, there is still a lot of green vine the remaining caterpillars can eat, though I imagine they are greatly longing for a gourmet entree, a fresh tender Passionvine leaf. So I get to feel a little guilty that we’ve run out of the tasty food (but they were little piggies, you know). Add to it the fact that we’ve got a major cold front about to pass through — poor little caterpillars! Find a warm spot and tuck yourselves in for a few days!

Alas, the best of intentions to write a blog post fall short when one gets sick. Without going into detail, let’s just say that I’m thrilled that the O’Reilly Thanksgiving Cold & Cough of 2011 is over (I can’t jinx myself if Thanksgiving 2011 has already passed, right?). But today I’m enjoying the sounds of rain pitter-pattering outside. While we’ll be in a drought for some time to come, I can at least be thankful for the recent rains that are giving a boost to plants’ survival chances.

While wandering the yard this week, I gleefully discovered new natives springing up in various spots. 
This is a big advantage to my give-nature-room-to-grow style of gardening!

This Indian Mallow comes with the soft leaves of its type. The leaves are much smaller than those of my Velvet-Leaf Mallow, which get bigger than my hand, but the plant is still young yet. I’ll refrain from IDing it further until it gets a little bigger, because while I want it to be a true Indian Mallow for variety’s sake, it could just be a tiny Velvetleaf working on getting big. That would be fine, too. In any case, I adore these touch-friendly plants. So do skippers and hairstreaks, because guess what — these mallows are caterpillar host plants for them!

Back in the back, this beautiful aster is showing its colors. It looks like a Texas Aster or a Calico Aster, but its leaves are throwing me off — they just aren’t as elongated as I’d expect. Needless to say, I can’t say for sure what kind of aster it is, just that it IS an aster, of course. Asters are known to interbreed, so perhaps I’ll never really know. In any case, the blooms earn their calico description with white rays and yellow disk flowers that turn purple with age. The hoverflies and native bees love the blooms. Let it spread, let it spread, let it spread.

Last weekend I spread lots of native Texas seeds around. I had wanted to set up a big germination station this fall, but time didn’t allow it, so I figured they’d at least have a better chance to grow if they were out there in the environment and actually touching DIRT instead of being stuck in my seed container. Some of the many seeds I distributed include: Gayfeather, Antelope Horn, Green Milkweed, Balsam Gourd, Mexican Buckeye, Purple Coneflower, Indian Blanket, Greenthread, Tahoka Daisy,  Alamo Vine, Purple PassionflowerVine, Standing Cypress, Red Columbine, Yellow Columbine, Mealy Blue Sage, American Beautyberry, Pigeonberry, Eryngo, Giant Spiderwort, Scarlet Sage, Compass Plant, Lindheimer’s Crownbeard, Lanceleaf Coreopsis, Scarlet Leatherflower, Other Assorted Native Texas Perennials for Fall,and Native Seeds That Shall Remain Nameless Because I Neglected to Write Their Info Down (a.k.a. Mystery Seeds). Oh, and poppy (only non-native).

A few weeks ago, I had an earlier round of seed-spreading love. This week I noticed a little baby bluebonnet growing. There are other seedlings growing, as well, but they are in the Too-Small-To-Be-Identified Stage.

The goal for the day is to make another peanut butter mixture for my bird friends. A cold front will be here this weekend, and I want them to have plenty of fat and protein to help them get through it. I’ve been using Bark Butter, which I also love, but I want something I can spread easily and quickly in the cold, and making it yourself is just more cost effective.

Steady gentle rain still coming down — enjoy the refreshing drink, Mother Earth!

With so much going on this weekend, somehow I still managed to sneak out with my son to enjoy a lecture by notable botanist Bill Carr. He was speaking about rare native plants of Travis County, and I’m happy to report that even my son took notes, a rare occurrence of its own (his middle-school teachers would be proud).

Afterwards, we took a short hike through part of the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve. This small portion of the preserve happened to be owned and managed by Concordia University under the guidance of Travis County Parks and Wildlife. We didn’t find any of the rare plants Bill mentioned during his lecture (it’s okay, because we weren’t expecting to). But we did see some other plants special for reasons all their own.

It being fall, and fall after a drought at that, many plants were in various stages of winter prep. As such, when we happened upon a beautiful bloom, it stood out all the more. Here’s the lovely Plateau Goldeneye (Viguiera dentata), a member of the Aster family. That means it’s related to sunflowers, artichokes, and lettuce, of all things. I just love taxonomy.

In several areas along the modest trail, the five-leaved vine Virginia Creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) was showing off its red fall colors.

It can grow remarkably high in a tree. Berries of this plant are an important winter food source for birds.

Another vine abundant at the preserve was Alabama Supple-jack (Berchemia scandens). Commonly known as Rattan Vine for its wicker-like properties, Supple-jack was easily located thanks to its remarkably thick, twisting vines.

If it looks wickedly strong, that’s because it is.

The bluish fruits are popular with birds and small mammals, and as you can tell from the numerous berries in the image above, it’s got a pretty good chance for making more little Supple-jack babies. That’s a pretty good thing if you are a bird or a small mammal — not such a good thing if you are a tree that has to support one or more of the vines.

Below, Late Boneset (Eupatorium serotinum) is showing off its striking profile.

It likes more moisture than its cousin Shrubby Boneset (Ageratina havanensis) requires, but it’s just as great a nectar source. Guess what? Like Plateau Goldeneye, it’s in the Aster family.

Shrubby Boneset was also at the preserve, growing farther back in the woodlands. A distinguishing characteristic is that its floral disks are less clumped than those of the Late Boneset.

How about a plant that actually has “aster” in the name? Here’s Texas Aster (Symphyotrichum drummondii var. texanum).

It’s always such a pretty sight when walking in woods of the Edwards Plateau.

Every once in a while, if you are really, really, lucky — or at least somewhere that happens to have water — you get to see moss in Texas. We need more water here so that we can have more moss. I declare it.

American Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis), as seen below, is such a pretty tree. The fruits are the oddest little round balls.

In the spring when these balls first form, they are covered with little individual flowers, each of which eventually forms an individual seed. So a seed ball is made of many seeds, not just one big one that can whack you on the head when it falls after winter passes.

Here’s our guide, botanist and author Bill Carr. As we were walking along, he’d suddenly stop to show us an obscure little plant and tell us many wonderful things about it. Needless to say, those of us who walked with him didn’t manage to walk as far as the other group — there were too many plants to stop and admire! But oh did we learn a lot. If you have a chance to take a hike with a botanist, especially one as knowledgeable as Bill Carr, I highly recommend it.

 I’m going to be a little wordy today. I haven’t had a chance to post in a while, so my fingers felt like they had a lot to say.

I’m back. I didn’t actually go anywhere, no getting whisked away on a dreamy vacation, not even any sort of business trip anywhere cool or even not so cool (though I have been spending a whole lot of time in awful traffic– yuck). But I have been insanely busy, so much so that my poor blog has been crying out in neglect. Neglect! I’ve missed it so. I tried several times to get a new post up, but alas — something would pull me away and by the time I returned, days would have passed. I’m hoping I’ll be back on track, starting today! I’m sad, however, to report that today I announced that I will no longer be a regular team author at Beautiful Wildlife Garden. It was a tough decision, but I’ve got to pull back to take better care of an enormous load of responsibilities, and with it I hope to be able to give Great Stems better attention once again.

Sunrise gleaming on Almond Verbena

I can, at least, say that I’ve been gardening. I managed to get to the fall plant sale at the Wildflower Center last month, and from it I brought home several native plant varieties I didn’t have. I even managed to get most of them in the ground, believe it or not. I bought nifty vines like Berlandier’s Trumpet, Star Milkvine, Maypop Passionflower — also a few trees and shrubs, and lots of miscellaneous. As they grow, I’ll give them their own spotlight here at Great Stems.

My prize was this: Lime Prickly Ash, Zanthoxylum fagara. Just check out the thorns on this baby! You know me, I love plants that threaten to maim passersby. Of course, when I got home, I found out that Lime Prickly Ash tends to grow a little more in the southern part of the Hill Country, which says to me that a harsh winter might not be its favorite thing. Alas, it will need some extra care come winter, and I will do my best. But I love it, and despite its thorns I’ve given it a nice spot right up near our main garden. This wonderful tree has the nickname Toothache Tree, because when you chew its very, very, very bitter leaves, your mouth goes numb. You also salivate a lot because, again, those leaves taste really nasty. I wish they tasted like lime, but no — they only smell like lime.

The Lime Prickly Ash went into the fenced backyard, because I read that deer love to munch on it. Now, one of my other prized purchases was an Escarpment Black Cherry tree. In this case, I read that most every part of the plant was toxic, so I decided it should go in the front yard so that my dogs wouldn’t accidentally ingest anything bad and throw it up all over my carpet, or worse, you know, die. Surely the deer would leave it alone. Ha. Had I been clever enough to visit more than one website for information, as I usually do, I would have read that deer also love to eat Escarpment Black Cherry, despite the fact that other mammals suffer ill effects from it. Needless to say, our neighborhood deer found it on the second night it was in the ground, munched off almost every leaf except one, and now it looks like Charlie Brown’s pitiful Christmas Tree. All I need is an ornament on top to make it droop right over. At least it still seems to be alive, so I have hope that it might recover. I’d show you a picture, but my camera couldn’t seem to take a decent picture of the twig formerly-known-as-a-tree-trunk.

The drought continues, but we have had a touch of rain. Not much, mind you, but we don’t complain when the sky sends a little moisture our way. The garden responded immediately with a bloom explosion.

Also, I’m seriously overdue on giving my annual garden update. Pending, pending, pending! But I’m happy to be back at my beloved Great Stems, blogging once again! I know I only disappeared for a couple of weeks, but it felt like an eternity!

I hope I haven’t been keeping people in too much suspense — I couldn’t get my post out until this evening. But drumroll please… Charlotte P., you are the winner of a $50 gift certificate to Hill Country Water Gardens! I’ll be e-mailing you to let you know the specifics and will also let Hill Country Water Gardens know you are coming. You’ll need to show your I.D. in order to receive your prize. Congratulations, Charlotte!

Thank you to everyone who participated in our giveaway for Support Your Independent Nursery Month. It was such fun! FYI, the winner was chosen via the random number generator at Random.org — how easy it made everything!

The extended drought really has created terrible hardships for our local nurseries, so all during October, designated Support Your Independent Nursery Month, several Austin garden bloggers have been highlighting their favorite nurseries each Wednesday to encourage people to get out there and give our local gems a little garden-shopping-kind-of-love. I can tell you that my garden and ponds would not even exist were it not for the wonderful plants, landscape materials, tips, and encouragement I’ve gotten from many of Austin’s finest nurseries. This is such a great time to get back in the garden, too — fall planting is the best for so many plants and delicious veggies. Whether you’re looking for new perennials or trees, pottery, holiday gifts, garden tools, or other items —  this is a great time to get them!

Here’s the extra exciting part: To tie in to Support Your Independent Nursery Month, eight Austin bloggers are offering great prizes to participating local nurseries. If you visit all eight blogs, you maximize your chances to win!

I’m quite pleased to be able to host a giveaway for a $50 gift certificate for Hill Country Water Gardens, one of my personal shopping spots. I visit HCWG for all my pond needs, and somehow I always manage to bring home plants or beautiful garden items with me, too. The many ponds, waterfalls, fountains, and streams found all over the 5-acre grounds are incredibly inspiring.

Hill Country Water Gardens is located at 1407 N. Bell Ave (old 183/Research Blvd.) in Cedar Park, just north of Hwy. 1431. The staff are friendly, knowledgeable, and quite happy to help you with pond information, aquatic plants, fish, and more. Furthermore, if you want a pond but just aren’t a do-it-yourselfer, they’ve got a professional installation team that will build your pond for you, or help you maintain it, as the case may be.

I also highly recommend the free how-to demonstrations HCWG staff regularly give to show homeowners how to install ponds and waterfalls, disappearing fountains, and disappearing streams. Great info and a perfect time to get all your questions answered about that new aquatic feature you’ve been wanting to build.

But Hill Country Water Gardens isn’t just about ponds — they have a great selection of native and adapted plants, and they have some of the most beautiful and unique pottery and garden art I’ve seen. And now you’ve got a chance to go there with a $50 gift certificate!

If you’d like a chance to win this fantastic prize, here’s what you should know:

1. You must leave a comment on this post to enter. If you have trouble with the reCAPTCHA, tell it to give you another set of letters to enter, or simply try again. Thanks!
2. Each participating blog will hold its own random drawing, so leave a comment on each blog to enter all the giveaways.
3. Only one comment per person per giveaway.
4. Participating bloggers and their families are ineligible to win.
5. Giveaway ends at 11:59pm on 10/26.
6. Winners will be announced on each blog on 10/27.
7. Winners must go to the nursery with a photo ID and pick up their prize in person within two weeks of winning. Prizes will not be mailed.

Be sure to visit the other Austin bloggers for a chance to win a gift certificate to other fantastic nurseries!

• Diana of Sharing Nature’s Garden is giving away a $50 gift certificate from Emerald Garden.
• Jenny at J Peterson Garden Design is hosting a $50 gift certificate prize from The Great Outdoors.
• Amy of Go Away, I’m Gardening! is giving away a $100 gift certificate from Sunshine Landscape & Garden Center.
• Cat, the Whimsical Gardener, is offering a $25 gift certificate prize from It’s About Thyme.
• Jenny at Rock Rose has a $50 gift certificate giveaway from Shoal Creek Nursery.
• Pam at Digging has a giveaway of both a $100 gift certificate and a Fall Power Package (valued at $50) from Barton Springs Nursery.
• Cyndi at Growing Optimism is giving away a $25 gift certificate to The Natural Gardener.

Thanks to all the participating bloggers and nurseries (and to Pam and BSN’s Bernadine for planning all this) — what fun this is! Good luck, everyone!

To all our friends and fellow Texans in danger from the vicious spread of wind-fueled wildfires across our drought-stricken state this Labor Day Weekend, our thoughts and hearts are with you. Texas Forest Service reports that 63 new fires began in 17 counties yesterday, with the biggest of all right right here in Central Texas at Bastrop. Brave firefighters are fighting blazes many miles wide, with hundreds of homes already destroyed, and many thousands of people evacuated. Wherever you are, please be safe, all.

Thank you to the brave heroes working non-stop to curtail the spread of flames and protect as many homes, people, and animals as they can.

CNN article about the Bastrop and other Texas fires

Info for donating or volunteering with the Red Cross of Central Texas

 Edit 9/6/11:

More info on ways to help

Adopt a pet to help make room for evacuee animals!

… and sometime you just act like one.