crazy plant lady

Amorphophallus flower! Still anonymous because it (like many others 🫩) has become separated from its tag, but I suspect albispathus. We'll know for sure when the leaf emerges.

Speaking of sunflowers, it's been a great year for the wild common sunflower (Helianthus annuus). I'm particularly fond of the Christmas tree-shaped individuals, with flowers top to bottom in every direction.

Silverleaf sunflower (Helianthus argophyllus). I collected the seeds in 2024, but didn't get any germination till this year. No flowers yet as this species doesn't start blooming until August, and keeps going all the way through autumn.

Billbergia brasilensis.

Various forms of baby (black-chinned hummingbird, Aztec spur-throat grasshopper, green anole, cliff swallow)

Synandrospadix vermitoxicus on May 31st and June 16th. Not sure if we'll get seeds, and I've previously lost developing fruit due to fungal infection of the spadix. The weather has been very wet since La Niña dissipated, a very welcome change, but it introduces a different set of challenges.

Ipomoea lindheimeri.

Sown on April 18th, 2023, the first of these Escobaria missouriensis to flower did so about three years and a week later. Probably about time to separate the bigger ones too.

4 specimens of shell hash. The dark gray and yellow stones are from Maverick County, the red is from Travis, and the brown from Caldwell. Shell hash is the fossilized remains of fragmented shells that accumulated on ancient seabeds. The fossils here are calcareous (i.e., limestone in the case of red and yellow rocks), or converted to siliceous rock in the case of the other two. The Caldwell County specimen is the hardest to make out; at some point the matrix seems to have been crushed before solidifying again, but shell edges are still visible upon close inspection.

Caracara from January.

While baileyi forms rounded clumps like recurvata, they're larger, with individual plants reaching 9in/22cm in length, and the inflorescenses are much larger and showier. The bracts are pink during flowering, but these were well past, with seed pods close to maturity. They are not as cold hardy as the other two species, but are easily grown in cultivation like any other air plant if protected from temperatures lower that what they'd be exposed to in their native range, bottoming out around 25°F/-4°C to be on the safe side. (Of course, in south Texas, that's not continuous cold, but a few scattered nightly lows here and there Dec - Feb, with highs rising above freezing during the day.) Their biggest threat in habitat is development, as it is for many species in this region.

Got to spend Christmas in the Lost Pines thanks to our lovely friends.

Inkcaps!

It's always interesting to let plants go to seed, because sometimes you learn things you might not have known otherwise. These Dyckia seedpods have been open for a while now. When we got all that rain in early July, I thought the last of the seeds would get washed out. Instead, the pods closed up again! Now that everything has dried, they've opened back up again. This happened on multiple plants, both pure species and hybrids. Pretty counterintuitive, since you'd think rainy conditions would better for germination, but clearly it's not that simple.