crazy plant lady

Austin, TX, USA. Hardiness zone 8b, heat zone 9, humid subtropical.

[syngoniums]

A bit of a mystery. In June I discovered three little plant...lets? growing on a dead leaf while I was moving the summer growing aroids outdoors. The bottom two pictures are actually the smaller pale blob visible at the bottom on the first pic - I delayed getting them onto soil, and then they didn't take to the soil. I tried an akadama mix next, which worked much better, albeit too late for the largest and smallest. Still have no clue what it is yet.

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Two wild swanflowers (Aristolochia erecta) in Gillespie County vs two seed-grown plants in my own garden (from seeds purchased online). The wild plants have noticeably more purple pigment, though I'm not sure if that's genetic or simply due to less water and more heat stress. You can see they're definitely shorter, ready to go in and out of summer dormancy in alignment with rainfall, while mine are very lanky and sprawling.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Billbergia brasilensis.

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

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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.

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Ipomoea lindheimeri.

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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.

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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.

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Caracara from January.

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There are three species of Tillandsia native to Texas. Two of them, ball moss (T. recurvata) and Spanish moss (T. usneoides) are widespread in the more humid eastern half of the state. However, the U.S. range of the third, Tillandsia baileyi, is restricted to a few counties near the Gulf coast in far south Texas, and its Mexican range is limited to Tamaulipas. This September, I was finally able to go see them near Brownsville, TX.

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.

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

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Inkcaps!

[thebashfulbotanist]

This plant is so beautiful... but wait until you hear one of its common names! This is Fritillaria camschatcensis, and I've always heard it called Kamchatka lily, chocolate lily, or black lily. But another common name I learned recently is "dirty diaper" - and if you've smelled it, you'd know why! As you'd expect, smells this way because it's pollinated mostly by flies. It's also very rare and endangered where I found it, in Washington State, so I feel very lucky to have spotted it.

Apparently, the bulbs, which break into bulblets - explaining another common name, rice root - were historically (and sometimes still are today!) eaten by Indigenous and First Nations people in its native range, especially further north where it's more common, but it's bitter and usually processed beforehand.

[wenbochenphoto]

Lechenaultia biloba is a natural anti-depressant to me, I can never have enough of this bright blue. This time, I tried a different way of filming it, and I was not disappointed by the result :-）