Native Plants @ MindSay

Breakfast Burrito and a Mt Dew             $3.24

Tank of Gas for the 270 mile Drive        $32.60

New Shovel and Pick Axe                      $46.87

Spending the Day Saving Endangered Species   Priceless

I spent the day on Sunday, driving out to near Lometa, Texas which is about 135 miles away.  The reason for this little trip was that I had the rare chance to see one of the rarest and most endangered plants in the State.

These are Dog Tooth Violets, in their far western range.  While fairly common along the east coast, the western ecotype is extremely rare.  I was able to dig up a few speciems to tranplant to our farm, in order to create another little pocket of this cool little plant. 

Since these plants were growing in solid limestone in the middle of dense thickets of Shin Oak, it was quite challenging to get the plants out of the ground.  It took me several hours of intense labor to get just a couple of dozen plants.  It was hard work, but spending my time helping to save endangered species seems to me to be a better way to spend my time than watching celebraties win awards on Tee Vee.

This is a short article tht my boss and I wrote together.  Hope you enjoy

In this neck of the woods, there's always one thing you can count on… the harsh climate. Months without rain followed by severe flooding, brutal heat and unforgiving cold, rampant wildfires, dry howling winds, late frosts and early freezes. That is the way of it here on the Great Plains in the new millennium. But what can be done to battle the relentless roadblocks that are thrown in front of today's landowner/ managers? How can we have proper stewardship of the land during these times that seem to rebuke our best intentions? Native plantings are certainly a large part of the answer. Our prairie rangeland plants have lived on this land for thousands of years, with nobody to fertilize or baby them. The idea of water hoses or irrigation pipes is completely foreign to them. Native seeds have endured centuries of flood, drought, fire, dust storms, and general abuse only to bounce back fuller and richer each time nature threw a curve ball their way. The plants that were too weak to survive died out long ago. We folks in modern times are left with a selection of Natives that are perfectly adapted. Native Seeds already contain all the information they need to know exactly how to live right here, without any extra care.

Once Native Plants are established on your property, the need to fertilize, water, replant, cultivate and pamper slowly fades away. The Natives simply don't need that kind of attention; they are fully adapted to our rainfall, soil types and climate. Life is too precious and short to spend it stirring up clouds of dust while mowing, fertilizing, tilling and replanting exotic vegetation every year. What is needed is to do it once, do it right, and sit back to enjoy the benefits that Native Plants provide.

In addition to reduced maintenance and worrisome fiddling, restoring our lands with Native Prairie has other benefits as well. Acre for acre the tall grass prairies, which only recently did grace the middle third of North America, could convert as much carbon-to-oxygen as the tropical rainforests of South America. More simply put, tallgrass prairie makes clean air. In today's world, more and more land is being covered up by Mega-Marts and Big Boxes with vast arenas of asphalt for parking our carbon-belching horse-less carriages.

Now, more than ever, it seems prudent and timely to consider putting a little balance back into this lopsided equation. After all, what is the value of a breath of fresh, clean air to fill our lungs? The tall Native Grasses also have the ability to trap rainfall, so that the water filters slowly into the soil recharging our rivers, lakes, springs and aquifers. Just think about it. After every rain, the bare Earth (plowed farmland) and overgrazed hills, with no grass covering its face, instead gushes down to the ocean carrying away our precious topsoil mixed with oil washing off all the concrete. Many Prairie Grasses produce extensive webs of fibrous-organic roots reaching down a whopping 20 feet into the soil. It is all about saving the face. The world's largest underground lake, the Ogallala Aquifer, is a direct result of millennia of tallgrass prairie collecting and holding our limited freshwater supply, so that it is available for future use. Much of the food crops that feed our nation (and the world) are irrigated from this aquifer. If we don't have the tall native grasses to capture the rainfall and recharge the aquifer, the world's largest underground lake could one day dry up.

Another benefit of restoring land to more bountiful native vegetation is the important role that Native Plants play for wildlife. Native Plants provide the perfect foods and habitat for all types of wildlife. Wildlife came to co-exist with, and depend on, the more intimate aspects such as nectars from the flowers, the nutritious fruits and seeds, to even the unique vegetative structures of the plants themselves. The importance of the "clump" featured by so many of the Native Grasses should not be taken lightly. For example, when contrasted to the matting tendency of a Bermuda turfgrass pasture, there is no comparison at all. This single aspect alone may determine whether a small mammal can even traverse your property, much less find suitable food or shelter. A ripple effect then reverberates throughout the food chain. You have no meadow mice, therefore you have no soaring hawks. You have no switchgrass, therefore you have no painted buntings. You have no eastern gama grass, therefore you have no turkey. You get the idea? And now after a fifty-year-long binge of promoting Bermuda turfgrass for every land use from cattle grazing to school lawns to roadsides, wildlife is fading fast into the past, along with the great North American Prairies. From deer to turkey, quail, dove, javelinas, countless song birds and butterflies, native wildlife depends on Native Plants to survive. Native wildlife provides us not only with sport, recreation and even meditation, but also a rich tapestry of diversity that makes the natural world both alive and absolutely fascinating.

Here's an advanced look at one of the articles that I wrote for the February issue of an organic gardening magazine. 

Fires rampaging across the state, and there is no trace of rain in the forecast.  It hasn’t rained in months and the land is as dry as a bone.  The Japanese Boxwoods, Asian Jasmine and Siberian Elms are turning up there toes and dying off left and right.  It seems that it would be impossible for any plant life to survive this harsh environment that we Texans seemed to be blessed with.   

As the limited supply of water is stretched further and further, to meet the needs of more and more people, it is high time that we gardeners find plants for our landscapes that can deal with dry and dusty place that we call home.  It might seem hard to believe but the answer to our problems has been here all along growing away peacefully right under our very noses. 

The answer to a harsh climate is, of course, hardy well adapted plants.  And what could be better adapted to our brutal temperatures, poor soils, floods and drought than the Native Plants that have been growing here in Texas for thousands of years with out the help of bags of fertilizer and the comfort of being near a water hose.

Here’s a short list of a few of the best drought tolerant perennial Native flowers that will take on the worst that our climate has to offer and come out blooming a beautiful in the end.

1.    Black Eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta)- yellow blooms May to November

2.    Blue Flax (Linum lewisii)- dainty blue flowers May to September

3.    Bush Sunflower (Simsa calva)- low growing sunflower that blooms from April through October

4.    Cutleaf Daisy (Engelmania pinnatifida)- compact plant with yellow blossoms from February to November

5.    Gayfeather (Liatris mucronata)- wonderful purple bloom spikes August to December

6.    Lanceleaf Coreopsis (Coreopsis lanceolata)- mostly evergreen with yellow blooms May to August

7.    Mealy Blue Sage (Salvia farinacea)- displays blue flowers April to November

8.    Prairie Verbena (Glandularia bipinatifida)- covered in purple blooms from March to October

9.    Winecup (Callirhoe involvucrata)- deep purple flowers February to June with a repeat show of color during the fall

10.                    Big Red Sage (Salvia pensteminoides)- the most striking of Sage plants with red flowers from June to October

These are just a few of the great Native Plants that are well suited to the home garden or on a larger scale wildflower meadow.  They are all very easy to grow and are commonly available at many independent nurseries.  They are also plants that can be easily grown from seed (www.seedsource.com).   They are all responsible and eco-logically sound choices for bringing beauty to our homes, offices and landscapes.  Every gardener and landscaper should be using these drought tolerant and hardy plants somewhere in their plantings.  When well adapted plants aren’t used it is not only the natural world that pays the price, but it is also a burden on all of our pockets that pay the price of higher water bills, higher costs of fertilizers and pesticides and of course the ultimate price of the degradation of our environment.

 So forget the exotic imports from over seas this year and get good old fashioned Native Texas Plants back into your landscape.  It’s less work, better for your wallet, good for the environment and just the right thing to do.

I got to spend the past few days at the LBJ Wildflower Center ( http://www.wildflower.org/ ) in Austin, Texas for a conference dealing with the situation of invasive exotic plants for the State of Texas. ( http://www.texasinvasives.org/conference/conference.html )  Our compant was one of the sponsers of the event, so I went to set up a display for the company and to attend the lectures, in order to stay on the cutting edge of information when it comes to dealing with invasive plants and meet more of the people that are involved in the cause.

There was a great turn out of people and it was quite a bit of fun.  I got the chance to see many old friends and to meet numerous interesting people.  All of which are involved in the fight to protect our natural hertiage in various ways.  And, as always, the Wildflower Center is a neat place to hang out.

If any one, except for an eco-freak, like me, is interested in more info, please check out the links that I posted above or just throw your question my way and we'll see if I can answer.