Often I find that the smaller flowers are in more interesting place.  This little daisy was under a wide band of gaillardias and coreopsis.  I haven't identified them yet but I like the contrast of the limestone rocks with the greens of the plants. 

The Texas thistles were in an empty field fenced off by an assortment of wire some of it being used for what it was intended and others borrowed.  Some of the heads had gone to seed while many were in full bloom.

The hills were alive with golden flowers dotted with horsemint and thistles.  I have never seen such a solid swathe of gold before.  On the hills in the distance you could see areas of a yellow green which we figured out were actually meadows filled with the golden flowers. 

 Here and there we saw fields of the red Indian Blankets or Gaillardia - one of my favorite colors.  I found a few patches of bluebonnets that were trying to finish out in style. 

May Roadtrip - Part One - The Bat Roost

We decided to head out to the Texas Hill Country for an overnight and picked Comfort Texas because although both of us have spent considerable time in the Hill Country and we both have lived in San Antonio, we never got up to Comfort.  The Texas Hill Country is full of oddities, beauties and quite a bit of entertaining places.



borrowed from Wikimedia Commons.



My picture taking is so hit and miss.  I see things in hind sight that I should have taken.  I took almost no pictures of Comfort itself.  Comfort is a wonderful little town located in Kendall County,  It's roughly 45 miles northwest of San Antonio and 72 miles west of Austin unless, you decide to wander.  It was originally settled by German freethinkers.  These guys were mostly intellectuals who were non religious and anti slavery.  This tended to get them into trouble.  It was 1900 before the first churches were built in Comfort and during the Civil War, about 35 men were ambushed and killed while on their way to Mexico by Confederate soldiers.  The bodies, which had been left exposed were collected and buried in Comfort.   The monument is called Treuer der Union and honors these German freethinkers.



The whole main street (called High Street because it sits higher than the rest from the Cypress Creek that runs through the town) is filled with wonderful old limestone buildings.  We stayed at this really cool B&B called Meyers Bed and Breakfast which is directly on the creek.  All the rooms are in historical buildings (although the insides are remodeled and have modern features).  After we checked in we took off and went riding making a big circle from Comfort to the Bandera Pass and then back through the Lost Maples area.  We've already decided we're coming back there was so much to see and do.  Plus I can take more photos.  

One of the places quite close to Comfort was this structure called the Bat Roost.  It's technically on private property but you can see it from the road.  We got out and stared at it for quite awhile and took some photos of it.  The Bat Roost was an idea thought up by Dr. Charles Campbell in an effort to help control malaria carrying mosquitoes.  His experiment was whether bats (who eat large quantities of mosquitoes) could be raised like bees, keeping the bug population down and also providing valuable bat guano at the same time.  Since bats don't just pick any old shelter to roost in, Campbell experimented with various building shapes until he came up with one design.  Calling it the Bat Roost, he pretty much promoted the use of them with astonishing results.  You can read it here http://batcon.org/ in a excellent article written by Mari Murphy for Bat Conservation International:  (look in their archives)   BCI is a wonderful organization working on appreciating how much bats help (especially in the Austin area.)

I had never heard of it but we found it in a newly planted pear orchard and took some photos from the street.  One of them is a little blurry but hopefully you can appreciate the photos.  This one located in Comfort, like I said, is on private land as is the other one somewhere in Texas. The third remaining structure is in Florida.   In the BCI article, it stated that Campbell was nominated in 1919 for a Nobel Prize.

Part Two if the Comfort trip will appear shortly. 

April blooms

Last weekend we went on a drive which was lovely and sad at the same time.  The old roads are slowly changing to make way for developments and small communities of slap together almost identical buildings.  I really miss the winding roads that had few cars and lots of nature.  The up side is that Texas really loves it's roadside flowers (thanks to the prompting of Ladybird Johnson and her like minded companions).  With the solid rains we had everything is deep in bloom.



Purple verbena

Since the shoulders have become increasingly smaller and the cars going by seem to not be happy if you wander too slow, we pulled off into one of the new yet to be finished developments.  For about thirty minutes I hobbled around on the old crutches and Gene ambled in and amid the cedar and other trees.  He had had to really encourage me to get out - the trouble of getting in and out of the car sometimes makes it really difficult to be enthused.  I'm glad I did.  I found some really lovely flowers and got some fairly nice shots.  

A Texas thistle getting ready to bloom

antelope horn milkweed

I'll probably go in and edit these a bit but wanted to get some photos up in time for spring.  It goes so quickly here.  It's almost summer weather. 

An old poem found amid the treasures.

 TAKING TEA

We take tea
You and I
Amid the cutlery and jam jars.
You tell me how unhappy you are
and I notice how red
the blooms on the geranium look reflecting
in the toaster.
You are always unhappy -
This time it was the man you were seeing
It could have been your car, your job --
it doesn't matter.
I sit watching changes in the weather, the clouds.
I try to listen, I try to care,
but your unhappiness just fills the room with smoke
-burning toast- I think
and then the geraniums catch my eye.

I have no idea about when I wrote this.  

The Scent of Spring

Having survived a rough summer last year, Austin has been rewarded with a mild winter and a sizable chunk of rain.  The result is a very lush green spring full of growth, flowers and what I consider to be the scent of what spring is here on my side of town.  Every year when the grass gets long and lush you hear the sound of the lawnmowers revving up in various parts of the neighbor hood.  Our front lawn got mowed (minus the bits of wildflowers I was allowed to leave and let bloom.  (Alas, it need mowing again although it's been about a week and a half.  Its that scent of the assorted mowed herbage that tells me it's spring. But it's one particular plant that tells me it's spring.



wild onions

 Thomas, one of my friends from way back drifted over with flower pots looking for wild plants to "borrow". We three wandered out and I found him spiderwort, pigeon berry and escapee sunflowers from the bird feeder. I also offered up the main produce from our back yard and the reason I know it's spring. Wild onions. They grow wild freely in our part of Austin - actually most of Austin . Our back yead is full of them. We dig them up and eat them. I dug some up for a co-worker (one of my fellow temps). The plants I'm growing are technically not wild onions but wild garlic or Allium canadese var. canadense -  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allium_canadense Texas has 16 varieties of wild onion throughout the state. In my neck of the woods, these take the prize. The onions not only produce underground bulbs but little flowers and bulbets on the top. All edible. They are amazingly strong but really tasty. We have other varieties including the Allium drummundii  with it's cute little pink flowers (it's milder as well)  growing near us but the canadense certainly wins as the big crop in the yard.

 

The back yard with its sense of abandon and mayhem has been allowed the freedom of expression.  Those dead trees make it hard to do a simple mow, not only are they big but they also drop stray branches, bits (actually chunks) of dead bark making us pick them all up before we can mow.  Since I'm not more or less on crutches until we figure out (and afford) what it is to make it better and Gene's into aversion on mowing without me for fear of cutting down the wild plant I want to keep things just don't get mowed.  So our weeds have gotten quite tall.  The onions have managed over about a third of the yard although I've found them hidden in the rosemary and culinary sage - (the survivors of last summer 100+ degree weather.  They haven't been as hearty as the ones in the main patch. 




on the left the patch of wild alliums behind the tree - ignore the weeds.

 

I've really enjoyed them this year.  We've used them in a number of dishes where you can use green onions or other onions.  Edible Austin had this fabulous recipe for using them in a tart (or quiche) here - http://www.edibleaustin.com/content/editorial/recipes/wild-onion-tart 

and Edible Rhode Island had this wild onion pesto that sounds really good  on bread toasted or maybe on a baked potato.  My co-worker loves them with eggs.  http://www.ediblecommunities.com/rhody/side-dishes-and-beverages-and-other/beau-vestals-wild-onion-pesto.htm

Thinking of past Februaries

I'm sitting here celebrating my last day of freedom before I start a temp job.  I have almost given up thinking I would get a permanent job (and definitely not at the University)  Yes, I seem to have developed anger issues with a University that thinks it's God's gift to the Universe.  I mean they pay their head football coach over 6 Million a year but can't seem to remember to hire people who need jobs.  (long long story). 

But I wander.  The fact that I start work tomorrow made me think about other jobs I have had in February.

My best memory is when I worked at this little bookstore with my best friend Hal (who was also my housemate).  I actually got him hired since I worked there first.  It was originally down in south South Austin and I was happy when they moved.  However the choice (although about a mile or two from our house) was ideal - the choice was terrible for a book store.  It was linked with a gift store and a card store and the owner put them all in one huge storefront.  In a virtually empty outdoor mall.  While it was never busy, we got to read, hang out with the manager (really cool fellow named Robert) and eat at the little Bistro behind us which had the best Mulligawney Soup and a Queen Victoria cake that was sooooo good.  One February - Austin got ice and snow so the whole city closed right down. (A tendency in central and southern Texas towns.)  Eeek!  Snow - they say and all life stops.  So Hal and I - growing bored at home after two and a half days - suited up and walked to the store in the pretty empty city.  We got there made hot drinks and settled in for a few happy hours of reading, cleaning and just generally seeing things outside other windows.   So who walks in but Robert who was tired of being home as well.  We got customers who also were bored.  Still a nice day. (The store and it's other paired stores (the cards and the gifts) were eventually sold to what became a mega store by the mismanaging owner who had no business sense at all).

My other memory of work and February is the second day of work at the University.  I got there only to have them shut it down for a sever ice storm.  I managed to get on the last shuttle home and what normally takes 10 minutes to travel to home, took close to an hour.  Then I had to walk on the icy street with the crazy drivers.  The following year we had 80+ degree weather.

This year the weather has been wet but not too bad.  I will enjoy the foray out with real people who want me to do something.  I will hopefully feel appreciated out there in the workplace.  It will be good.

The sinister cedar

Every year about this time, I start hating trees.  Not all trees - just the ones who make my life miserable for a month or so.  You wouldn't think a tree could attack and win over thousands of people... knocking them low to where they lie in their beds, wishing they were dead.  You hear people on the bus, in the office or classroom, hacking, sneezing and basically looking like dead warmed over.

Enter the Mountain Cedar... (Juniperus ashei )  who during the months of December through May court and spark with the male trees dumping their pollen over the neighborhood in hopes of fathering baby cedars.  And its no light dusting.  The trees can easily look like they are on fire with the amount of pollen they dump.  Nor is it the occasional tree.  Think crab grass, or lawn weeds and you have an idea of how many we have in Austin and the Hill Country.  They have other bad habits as well - they absorb huge amounts of our ground water - especially during droughts.They choke out native hardwood trees and Blackland Prairie grasses. I think the one good thing about them is they provide shelter for songbirds in our areas.  

But in the months of December through February they are the deadliest of trees.  I think of this as I sit sneezing and feeling the pollen creeping into my body.