{"id":258,"date":"2009-05-10T18:17:23","date_gmt":"2009-05-11T00:17:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/?p=258"},"modified":"2009-05-10T18:17:23","modified_gmt":"2009-05-11T00:17:23","slug":"wildflowers-and-visitors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/?p=258","title":{"rendered":"Wildflowers and Visitors"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve all had the experience of visitors arriving just before, or just after, the best show of flowers\/vegetables…the garden just isn’t looking its best the day they come, but it was right before (or after.)\u00a0 We once spent a small fortune watering a patch of bluebonnets, trying to keep it in flower in a drought year for my husband’s aunt, who–when shown them–said “Is that all?\u00a0 Why do people make a fuss over those<\/em>?”<\/p>\n

Well, we had houseguests this past week–late for one set of flowers and early for another–but the land graciously showed them something anyway:<\/p>\n

\"pink-mint-yellow148a\"I have never seen, in the nine years we’ve owned the place, such a good showing of Prairie Brazoria, Warnockia scutellarioides<\/em>.\u00a0 Like all our natives, it’s responsive to the exact weather conditions, and apparently it likes a hard, long drought followed by a rescue rain at exactly the right moment.\u00a0 The week before, I’d found some just coming into bloom:<\/p>\n

\"prairie_brazoria072\"<\/p>\n

It’s a beautiful little plant individually, but in drifts with the yellow Pyrrhopappus and Texas star scattered above it, it’s quite a sight.\u00a0 It’s ankle-high, at most.\u00a0 It likes shallow soil (but not pure rock) and we have it mostly around the edges of the dry woods.\u00a0 I might try collecting seed this year and sow it in the wildflower garden back at the house.<\/p>\n

Also out and about were the gravel-land plants that grow along the upper creekbed, out of, well, gravel.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I’m very fond of two in particular, Showy False Foxglove and Prairie Larkspur.<\/p>\n

\"prairie-larkspur162\"<\/p>\n

The Prairie Larkspur, Delphinium carolinianum<\/em>, floats airilyabove the lower grasses, showing the muted but incredible colors you see in the pre-dawn sky for just moments, or in clouds after the sunset colors are gone but the light lingers.<\/p>\n

More robust, but also gorgeous, is the Showy False Foxglove,\u00a0 Penstemon cobaea<\/em>.\u00a0 The outside of the\u00a0 flower ranges from palest pink to deep lavender-rose, with the inside always snowy white but for the cleanly marked purple\u00a0 “bee-guide” stripes.<\/p>\n

\"penstemon-cobaea161\"<\/p>\n

Also in bloom were sensitive briar, Englemann’s daisy, the first of our gaillardias,\u00a0 the first greenthread (which is yellow, for those of you not from Texas), mealy blue sage, spiderwort, and dayflower:<\/p>\n

\"dayflower150\"<\/p>\n

Astonishingly (to me, anyway) this Commenlina erecta<\/em> grows up in the dry woods, on thin soil over rock, often in a clump of cactus.\u00a0 The flowers are large and brilliant blue.<\/p>\n

I think our guests were pleasantly surprised.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’ve all had the experience of visitors arriving just before, or just after, the best show of flowers\/vegetables…the garden just isn’t looking its best the day they come, but it was right before (or after.)\u00a0 We once spent a small fortune watering a patch of bluebonnets, trying to keep it in flower in a drought […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,7],"tags":[13,32,70],"class_list":["post-258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photography","category-plantlife","tag-beauty","tag-native-plants","tag-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":264,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions\/264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}