I like periodic flowers. The ones that show up just for the briefest of moments. The ones you see only if you're looking. For instance, in the dead grass of the back lots, I now have rain lilies, which as the name suggests means they come up after a rain. I also have schoolhouse flowers that are now blooming in their September, welcome back to school display. Lovely blooms in both cases.

Nothing quite compares to the thrill of walking out your backdoor in the dark of the early morning to feed your cats and finding yourself face-to-face with a yellow garden spider with its web wrapped around your head. It’s an arm thrashing thrill. I’m pretty sure the spider was equally excited. I mean, as meals go, I would have been a big one. But I got away, fed the cats, and helped the spider relocate.

The removal of the dead has commenced. All throughout the garden stand the remains of the seasonal plants, almost all natives, who have succumbed to the heat and lack of rain. This includes grasses of course, because we are at the edge of the country and windblown seeds find my yard a convenient way-point. The digging or pulling is sometimes difficult because the ground has hardened, but that is normal.

The new garden along the north fence is rounding into form. The mist flowers I planted this spring have taken root and are expanding their footprint. The sage is in bloom. The chinquapin oak is flush with leaves. The yellow bells is getting ready for fall. I’ve decided to let the bindweed have the fence, but I’ve planted morning glory and alamo vine as alternatives. The latter came from seeds I potted on the porch.

My hardwood mulch is growing a mushroom forest. Gray Inkcaps, lots of them. Four days of rain will do that for you. Since last Thursday more than three inches has fallen on the homestead courtesy of decaying tropical systems from Mexico and a low pressure ridge from the northwest. Every river I can name all around me is running full and the local lakes are benefitting. I hope this spasm of wet weather is a portent of better things to come. Blanco county, however, is in the grip of a drought that started in 2022 and it looks to be worse than the one we endured in 2011-2015.

I’ve been in remembering mode recently. Mostly good things. And one of those things was our first garden, early in our marriage, while I was still a student in the 70s. We lived with another couple. Communes were good. Community was good. We found a nice big old house close to downtown Houston and turned our backyard into a garden. I was an organic gardener, too, because I’d read Silent Spring and knew that while plastics might be good career advice, chemicals might not be so hot for the planet.

It’s always interesting to me the love-hate relationship people have with plants, particularly the ones they don’t like. Crape Myrtles, for instance, are considered messy trees by some of my friends, and lantanas are equally disliked by others. We have both in our yard, and we’ve had them in every yard we ever owned. 

My run in with The Ecology of Invasion by Animals and Plants by Charles S. Elton has stirred up a lot of sediment in the old brain. I am reminded of Earth Days gone by. I remember protests on the banks of the Houston Ship Channel. I helped remove ligustrums from the park next door. I supported movements to protect animals because a short food chain is an unstable food chain. It's as though I thought the war had been won, only to realize it’s still raging. Thanks, Charlie.

I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I’ve puzzled sometimes over what I’m beholding, especially when it comes to my gardens because I know they are in no way classical. If anything, they look like pure chaos. Plants are thrown together and sometimes plants which in other times would have been considered weeds are allowed to stay, just to see what they do. There are days when I look at  the garden and wonder what in the world am I doing.

Made a nice little discovery in the new garden along the north fence. Sunshine Mimosa (Mimosa strigillosa). How can you not like a plant with that name? It speaks of bright mornings, orange juice, and champagne. Plus, it’s got fern-like leaves and purple blooms. I’ll have to keep my eye on it and see what it does. It’s supposed to be a ground cover and it’s drought tolerant because it has deep roots, but so is khaki weed and I don’t want that in my garden.

I’m glad for the weekend because my back has decided to remind me that I’m an old man. Although, since I’m old and retired, I don’t really need the excuse of the weekend to sit around and do nothing. But old habits die hard and on most weekdays, I feel like I should be doing something and a bad back is a real hindrance. Luckily, I’m pretty much caught up on the yard word, so what needs doing is pretty easy.

I’ve decided I’m going to war against nutsedge. Not on a grand scale, just in what I now call the north fence garden. The problem I have is that the garden is currently mostly bare dirt and that’s just an invitation for everything to come grow. I can dig up the nutsedge as I dig up the coastal bermuda. Of course, there are poison options, but I’ve always preferred pulling and digging as my weed control option, even when I had a lawn in the suburbs.

I’m fond of expressing my appreciation for native plants, and castigating invasives but I wonder now if that language is appropriate or even helpful. Before the advent of humans, I’m fairly certain plants moved from place to place born on the wind or in the guts of birds or animals as seeds. That’s how any island developed its biosphere. So, no plant springs whole cloth from the ground. They just get somewhere. Like it. And grow.

When is a weed a weed? Answer. When you decide it is. This is particularly true when you like plants from the wild. Because almost every weed flowers and sometimes they look nice in the garden. And native plants are usually ones you find growing in the wild although I don’t believe I’ve ever run across a salvia greggi in the wild. Although maybe I just haven’t been looking. In the end, it comes down to taste and your willingness to pay attention.

Let’s mutter around some more in the gardens and talk about blackfoot daisies. I’ve got them planted in four spots, and they’re doing amazingly well, especially since the recent rains have fallen, and we got another inch last night. I set them up to get the soft morning sun then afternoon shade. The soil is well drained although it might be too rich for them. I’d like them to become a fixture and now that I’m once again spending time with the plants, maybe that can happen.

This is going to be the gardening equivalent of bragging about your kids, telling everyone they really knocked it out of the park in fifth or sixth grade band, as if no one has ever had a kid who did something, some time to make their parents proud. But here goes. My catmint walker low is blooming. Both plants. Bought this spring for the back porch garden, which is notoriously hard on plants.

As expected the raccoon came to the bird feeder. Climbed up the tree, walked the fence, and found his dinner. Delicate and precise. He cleaned his plate, too. I know this because I moved one of my cameras to the mesquite tree off the back porch just so I could watch. It wasn’t a great loss. I don’t put a lot of feed in the birdbath feeder. One of these days I might fill it with water again, just to see if he comes to get a drink.

A thunderstorm sent me to bed last night and another woke me in the middle. A quick peek at the rain gauge this morning shows we got a bit more than an inch of rain. And that’s how an acre of land in the middle of Texas in the southern half of the US, fared yesterday. A private report. A data point. Something to plot. No doubt the AI engines will scope it up to learn what they need to learn, and maybe we’ll be better for it. And you can use it however you choose.

I think in the short term the new garden area along the north fence is complete. I moved the bottle tree from its old spot behind the big oaks and the new gazebo to a spot by the young chinquapin. Now, when I look out the kitchen window I see a tableau. The bottle tree, the oak, an upright rosemary, a statue of St. Francis, a talavera pot, a metal buzzard, a yellow bells, a sage, and gregg’s mist flower. The living and the inanimate.

I made a mistake. I started a new garden. Stopped. Changed direction. Here was the mistake. Rather than continuing to dig up grass and turn dirt I decided to put down landscape material. I have no idea why I thought that was a good idea. But I did. Hauled in mulch. It looked nice for about three months. Then the bermuda grass did what bermuda grass does. It grew. Through the landscape cloth, over the cloth, and in the cloth.