We went on a New Year’s Day hike this year at Hornsby Bend. It was a nice hike, but I saw a tall bush I hadn’t really noticed before. I looked it up and it’s Colubrina texensis - Texas Snakewood or Texas Hog Plum.
Colubrina texensis
After all of our Loquat trees died in the great freeze I’ve been trying to restablish screening plants. I noticed that Texas Kidneywood is a good screening plant in Winter, even though it’s decidious. Its branches are so fine and interwoven that it provides pretty good screening. I noticed the Hog Plum has a similar habit.
I ordered some seeds off of Etsy. I’m still very amatuer when it comes to growing things from seeds. I think most of my success is just accidental. In any case I squealed the other night when I saw this. Julie came running to see what was going on.
Hog Plum Seedlings
Fingers crossed, we’ll be getting some new bushes this year, and I’ll have some to share!
We’ve had some spectacular full moons recently. I have an Android phone with Night Sight which helped me take these photos. I thought they were cool and surreal.
Not a lot of attention was put into taking these as Julie was waiting to go to bed.
Lisa of Lisa’s Landscape and Design has been posting plants on Facebook that do well in this heat. I’ve been feeling pretty beaten down like a lot of Austinites by this unrelenting heat and dryness. But it did inspire me to show off what is doing well. Because there are actually some things still blooming and not (too) crunchy.
Cenizo or Barometer Bush. Every garden should have multiple. They bloom when you least expect it.
Flame Acanthus. Hummingbirds are still visiting it on the regular. It’s a bit crispy, but I’ll allow it.
Kidneywood or Bee Brush. I’ve been planting a lot of this as it fills in really densely. But this is around a year old and is holding its own in this drought.
Red Yucca. Second stop for the daily hummingbirds.
Big Muhly in the foreground, purple heart behind it, and accompanied by a Texas Mountain Laurel looking cool and inviting.
Fall Aster. One of my favorites. This gets no irrigation, other than rain, and look at this! I cut back a bunch of plants just so I could admire it better. I never do that.
Gayfeather shaded by a Retama. This is gayfeather from Native American Seed. I found out that Blazing Star is for more moist soils. So if you’ve been striking out with that and want the super xeric kind make sure to order the regular gayfeather.
Aren’t those seedheads pretty? They’re very yellow. This is Indian Grass from Native American Seed.
I have lost track of what this is. It was supposed to grow up a trellis, but it hated that, and instead loves mounding in this area. You just see some of its tiny hot pink flowers if you look close enough. Let me know if you know what it is!
Thompson’s yucca I grew from seed.
Gopher plant. This is one of the foundational corners of my yard and is pretty much always happy.
Sensitive Briar. In many places very crispy, but we’ve still got a couple pink puffballs there!
Gregg’s Mistflower. Crispy, but we’ve still got some blooms.
Got some sideoats gramma that’s holding on, and some violet ruellia. I tend to treat that as a weed, but this is a set of berms I’ve made to retain water, so I might just let them take over. They’re very pretty.
And finally Woolly Stemodia. Which lives next to the gopher plant and regularly plays the game where it disappears almost entirely for a year or two. This year it seems very happy. Go figure.
What do you have that’s still keeping on in this heat?
One thing that people are frequently clamoring for in Texas are evergreen bushes. The problem is there really aren’t any natives that match what people expect. So they plant Privet and Photinias. Which are an eco-nightmare.
But I’ve been thinking for a while. I have two Mountain Laurels that are underneath trees that I see all the time. They’re living they’re best lives and seem to be in no way interested in competing as a tree. They’re just spreading as bushes.
Got me thinking - why don’t we use mountain laurels as bushes? I mean sure they grow glacially, but nurseries tend to sell them at exactly bush height.
I started playing with one in my yard that I planted too close to the house. This is what it looked like. It clearly can’t grow up or it’ll hit the eaves. It’s in the path. But it’s also a pretty dang happy looking plant.
So I decided to experiment shaping it a bit with a hedge trimmer, and it looks pretty ok:
I think you could definitely create a hedgerow of these. Have you seen anyone do it?
After a long day summer we’ve had a delightful number of fall flowers that are still going. I cut back my salvias in July based upon advice from some zines, and it has been amazing to watch them bounce back.
A few (or six) years back I bought some plastic rain barrels. They had nice little planters in the top. For a while I had succulents growing in them.
But the freeze and this summer killed off the succulents. And then the lid started failing. Turns out having 50 pounds of granite and mulch on a plastic lid might be bit much.
So I scooped out all the mulch and dirt, and took a saw to remove the old top.
I put screws along the edge, and ordered a mesh draw string netting off of Amazon. I tightened the drawstring around the screws and everything is in place.
Hopefully I’ll get a few more years out of this barrel. We’ll see how it holds up when the rains come back.
Midcentury homes with gigantic windows are wonderful. We love looking out at our garden. But the heat… the heat…
In years past we replaced all of our windows with modern double-pane ones which was a huge upgrade and made our lives much more pleasant - especially in the winter. But in the summer, I sit at the breakfast table with my back against the windows and roast. We live in a greenhouse.
A conversation on Twitter brought up that in Europe they routinely cover their windows to keep the heat out or in, depending on the season, which is something we haven’t really done in the US. We tend to focus on interior window coverings, but those just trap the heat by your windows. The heat is still inside your house. The 50s and 60s had awnings, but those don’t work for the morning hours when the sun is blasting into our kitchen.
The roller blinds from the outside
One of the things that has changed is that we have smart homes so having outdoor blinds no longer requires going outside twice a day to pull them down and roll them back up. We decided to give outdoor roller shades a try. We went with Graywind custom shades* with a Zigbee motor. They can be triggered with a remote control and/or smart home hub. They have a battery that supposedly last 6 months and can be charged with USB-C cables.
Installing them was fairly trivial although it took a while because it’s hot outside. Every time we went out to work; it sucked out our will to live. But it involves putting up two brackets to hold the blinds and two magnetic brackets at the bottom of the window frame. It’s 10 screws per blind so really not a huge job. You need two people to mark where the brackets go, but you can let your helper free after that. You can add wire cable guides if you live in a windy area, although we skipped that for now.
Getting the remote to work and setting the top and bottom limits of the blinds was fussy and irritating. But it’s something you can do sitting in a chair in the shade.
Julie says it feels like we live in the movie E.T.
I use Home Assistant for home automation which is nerdy, but something most folks who have hosted a website or dealt with Docker containers can handle. I’ve setup the blinds to come down at 11:30pm each night. And to go up once the sun starts setting - i.e after the solar meridian. Here’s the trigger for that:
One of the things that I think can be a struggle for every native plant gardener is “what to weed”. We want our wildflowers to spread, but not our weeds. As part of that I thought I’d try to start doing comparisons. It’ll help me remember and maybe someone else.
I’m going to start with Gayfeather. It’s a plant you usually have to leave until fall before you see blooms so there are lots of opportunities to accidentally weed it.
I have two other plants in my yard that look like it. Here are the three:
Gayfeather
Horseweed?
Ragweed
Gayfeather’s leaves are very distinct and separated from one another.
In Horseweed the leaves are tightly packed.
Ragweed is apparently an artemesia and definitely has those delicate lace-like leaves. I find that when it’s short its color makes it blend in with Greg’s Mistflower.
Please excuse the pictures, but hopefully this is a helpful comparison.
I recently got Colleen Dieter’s “Let’s Care for Texas Plants” Zines. I love gardening books, but frequently finding information again can be a real struggle. Colleen has done a great job of creating 3 indexed volumes on plant care in Texas that are short and to the point. The first is about care for turf grass and trees. The second is common perennials. The third is common “other” plants like Agaves, Yuccas, and Roses.
She said she expects some of this to be controversial, but most of it lines up with my experience. Of course that makes sense. In a rather wild coincident we live in the same neighborhood a couple streets apart. We have the same street number and first word of addresses (think 123 Oak Ridge and 123 Oak Valley) so the mail person loves to give us each other’s mail. I’ve been walking over to return mail for years and admiring her yard, but somehow it took me years of reading her blog at Red Wheelbarrow to put two and two together.
I would recommend this for anyone growing plants in Texas. I’m also hoping other people start making zines like this.
I think I’m going to make and decorate a binder and put these inside. I’m going to add the City of Austin’s Grow Green guides and some well labeled tabs. It’ll be like a Better Homes and Gardens Garden Book, but actually relevant to my zone!
I highly recommend anyone who is trying to grow any plants outdoors in Texas buy this great resource. Pick it up over at Red Wheelbarrow:
