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!