Another Wild Critter Life-List Entry

This close-encounter-of-the-third-kind saga was foreshadowed by a conversation on Friday with my Port Aransas friend, Nancy, comparing stories about our annoying pocket gophers that dig tunnels and leave considerable heaps of sand all about. The heaps from these busy below-ground critters are visible all over the island, usually leaving amusing dotted lines across the landscape as they make their way using a tunnel-tunnel-surface-tunnel-tunnel-surface method.

There's nothing like a beautiful garden of treasured plants interrupted by the sudden appearance of a mound of sand, followed the next day by two more mounds, and then two days later with six more.

Now visualize this scene: Ray and I are enjoying a relaxing weekend session of working on the gentle downward slope of the front yard. I'm gathering dead branches from native plants that have completed their life cycle and he's watering the thirsty plants using a 3-foot watering wand that extends his reach. As I take a step, my foot surprises me by dropping four inches into the sand and collapsing a gopher tunnel. S#|+! Another tunnel means more heaps will soon be coming. I look down and realize the horizontal tunnel didn't anticipate the downward slope and I can clearly see straight into it. Suddenly, I see movement, and realize I just glimpsed the gopher as it moved away!

I shout the excitement to Ray how it was so close I could have touched it. But feeling there's nothing I can do other that go for poison, I just stomp the tunnel to make an unwelcoming environment for our unwanted friend. 

And then, just a couple of feet to my left, I notice where yet another tunnel is clearly open, and there in the opening is the small white face of a gopher looking straight at me! Without hesitation this time, I reach in and pull the little thing out!

What did I expect? It bit me! But I was wearing thick protective gloves, so pain with no harm meant I just dropped it on the ground and moved between it and its hole so it couldn't go back in.

This is NOT our gopher!
It somewhat resembles the one we met.

It was quite small for a gopher, no more than six inches long, and white -- white! -- not brown (like those in my research or one I once glimpsed in the back yard from a distance), and had several patches of gray to light brown over its back and underside. And it was very aggressive, lunging at me! Still feeling the significant pain from the bite, I wasn't going to try to stop it with my foot, and that's when Ray began squirting it with the jet spray from the watering wand.

No reaction. It kept coming.

Not willing to let a threat of any size hurt his spouse, Ray banged the little critter with the watering wand, which knocked it over and stopped its advance. It looked so startled and pathetic that I couldn't let him hurt it, so, using my experience from pulling armadillos out of their holes, I picked it up by its tail and carried it across the street, it wiggling but unable to bend and bite me again. I didn't want it in my yard, so relocating it seemed logical, so I tossed it as gently as I could into the thick, tall grasses on the other side of the road. It was the best solution for all that I could think of in the heat of the moment.

Then came the victory dance! I was so excited to have actually taken action against a considerable nuisance, actually pulled it out of the ground, experienced holding a wild animal in my hand, and felt successful that I'd taken immediate action in a situation presented to me to even slightly correct a problem, even if it returns.

When I say victory dance, I mean that literally, accompanied by several minutes of prolonged chanting and yelping, which I'm sure made my native american ancestors proud, if not for my style, then for my instinctive need to celebrate.

Then came the research. How could a gopher be white? None of the sites I found mentioned a white color other than some on the underside or perhaps a spot on the chest. There seems to be a range of documented colors from light brown to golden to very dark, but no mention I found of full-body white with patches or spots. I did find the statement that their color tends to match the color of the soil around their burrows, so -- white sand, white gopher? But spots?

We had a possum in Austin whose dark spots we could see as it climbed across the overhead umbrella of branches, but that was its skin color showing through its thin hair. Perhaps our white gopher's hair was so thin that its spotted skin was showing through.

Then I came across a reference to an albino pocket gopher, and a search for that term found -- boom -- many stories complete with photos that matched our little friend, though most noticeably larger. But wait. This site states that spotted and albino individuals are fairly common with Plains pocket gophers, so I'm leaning toward ours having been a juvenile, not yet fully-haired albino or leucistic of some unconfirmed species. That's my position until someone tells us otherwise. 

What's your theory?

October Observations

October is a Perfect Month

Not hot, not cold, or maybe a little of both. It's even rained.Tourists are gone, Winter Texans are arriving, festivals are starting, islanders are happy. We are contented.

Dragonflies Have Arrived

Adam Rose, famous for his amazing photos you
may have seen, took this splenda shot.

Some sort of dragonflies are always around, but October is the time the big ones, whose names I've not looked up, arrive in large numbers.The air has been full of these passionate pilots looking for a little action. It's hard to tell if the purpose of their aggression is the joy of life, the desire to stun a mate into submission, or to attack competition, but it feels quite violent to observe. Bashing head-on at 40 mph makes quite a crash, and feels it, too, when I happened to step in the path of one of those giants. What fun otherwise to stand in the midst of the passion playing out all around me.

Monarchs Have Arrived

This isn't one of our monarchs, who are too quick
for me to focus on, but ours look identical to it.

The Monarchs have arrived and I was seeing at least one every time I looked over from this screen and out a window. Two weeks ago (when I first wrote this line, thinking I'd publish more quickly than I have), I saw two in the time it took to write that previous sentence. And three more as I wrote the next one. I've watched them intentionally pass by the roses, the Mist flowers, the Mexican ruellias. Then they see the milkweed and they're done. They take a long drink, flap to the next flower, then another, and then rise in the air to locate the next milkweed. They work their way around the yard to each bunch, then to the front for the bunches they find there. So satisfying to know these beauties can find us as they navigate this long, long island on their long journey south.

Blackbirds Have Arrived

Our pseudo-blackbirds, grackles, are here all year, entertaining and irritating. They're attractive, but their voices aren't so great, though Ray seems to enjoy squawking back at them in the yard. Then suddenly, the Red-wing blackbirds arrived on the 8th and put them to shame. Smaller, shorter legs and tails, and, oh, their voices. I heard the flock coming and leaned out to look. The flock was landing in the cattails in waves till there were several dozen. Of course, some of them took flight again by the time I managed to find my phone. This is a view from my office window. They've stayed with us all month, and who could blame them as they enjoy their wait for the zillion of silver leaf sunflowers to go to seed.

The plants in front are Padre Island mist flowers (Conoclinium betonicifolium), mixed with various grasses.

This Month's Favorite Native: Passion Flower (Passiflora foetida)

On an evening trek through Port Aransas' Charlies' Pasture, my step-son, Adam, and I came across this wonderful vine. It won the people's choice award of the week for its beauty, intricacies, and charming carnivorous nature. 

The rattlesnake won second place.

Structure Changes

Sharing the Love

Others love the flowers more than we do and for reasons more important than their beauty — and here's one showing the love. I like the shots of the critters most, this one made possible by Ray happening to be on the porch for a sunset viewing when it came by.

Butterfly friends, can you please ID our friend?





Concrete Snuggling with Raised Beds

Here's the new elevated hot tub pad in the back-right corner of the yard with its somewhat smoothed slopes. Notice the concrete stepping-stone path Ray and I installed leading up the slope. We thought this might better protect the slope and offer our feet a chance to rid a little sand gathered getting to this point. I wonder now if it should continue a bit farther down the slope. 

See the german-chocolate-cake look of the area covered with hay to protect it from being blown away by the sometimes gale-like winds. Imagine apricot dwarf oleanders in that bed on the right. Or something narrower. Imagine flowery native ground cover on the slope to the left.

This shot is similar, but from the path leading to the pad.  

The fish chiminea was an early yard-warming gift to ourselves from the past winter's spring home and garden show in town.

Here, you see a walkway going around the pad, and the raised bed to its right, which is a middle-of-the-yard area with walkways on both sides. 

At the end of the bed is the just-added fan palm (marked down at our favorite nursery from $199 to $9.99), which will be a line-sight-breaking bush for numerous years before it realizes it's a tree. 

Moving even farther to the right, this shows the sloping mesa that is the hill the house sits upon. Future tall things are planted there, a Sea Grape (Coccoloba uvifera) and a Green-something bush whose name I cannot remember, but will go back later and look at the pot. We hope to add a few other interesting, tall and colorful additions to the area between the hot tub and the street. I'm thinking Oleander, Esperanza, Cape Honeysuckle. Think drought and salt tolerant.



Cattails, Love 'Em or Hate 'Em
My North Carolina buddy, Natasha, tells me she likes cattails and suggested I should be keeping them, not ripping them out by their stubborn roots every chance I get. I like the way cattails look dancing in the breeze together, but only when they grow in appropriate locations, like water. 

Our neighborhood has eight ponds, all of which have cattails, which is just fine. Our two ponds lie on the side property lines, one southeast and one northwest.Think strong seed-blowing southeast winds every day of the warm months, and northwest for the second half of the double whammy. With all the rain we had last winter and spring, we've had many hundreds of thousands of cattails come up all over our yard. And because they also reproduce by rhizomes, one cattail means two tomorrow, and four the day after. I don't find them attractive towering snugly against small flowering plants or any place but the ponds. 

News flash as we go to press: Yesterday's weed-pulling session revealed there are cattails and also a seemingly identical grass that has now started blooming. Actually, it has fuzzy little balls the same color green as the leaves, is rather attractive, and is a nice visual distinction between the two types of grasses. The cattails keep growing larger, this polite little blooming thing stays petite. It resembles photos I found of Cyperus eragrostis, Tall flatsedge.




Left of the Driveway
Ray was right. Putting a pile of sand near the front corner of our lot and then leaving it there for months as an attractive nuisance to growing things probably wasn't ideal. The original plan was to use the sand to protect yuccas and agaves from sloped rain runoff, and also do a little strengthening of the driveway. The sand where swale meets driveway was swept away by spring's rain-turned-river exuberance, and I'd hoped the cement folks would use leftover cement folks to shore up that spot. Time passed, we were busy elsewhere, things grew. The cement crew came and went, mistakenly dumping the left-over cement into the weeds out back, so it looks like we'll do swale cementing ourselves. Suddenly, my attention came back to front-left. Holy cattail, that sand pile is unsightly, so it's remedy time.

That was Friday. Today is Sunday. I removed the grasses on the pile. I bucket-carried sand to individual plants, creating water-catching/holding berms — I count over 60. My back says it feels like more.

The current plan for one of the next projects is to do our own repair using Quickcrete. While we're at it, we'll cement over the soft sand area around the AC units near the back-right corner of the house where rain water falls 36' and likes to take sand down the hill with it.

Coming soon... photos of this month's bloomings

Fall Has Arrived

Looking over the most recent posting from a month ago on Progress and Milestones, I'm reminded how quickly the perspective of where-are-we can change.

Where Are We?

We had four visitors during the Labor Day weekend who either had visited weeks before (daughter Liz and partner Jay) or had only seen landscape photos in our blogs (sister Betty and bro-in-law Ernie). They each shared reactions to changes they noticed since their last viewing. The consensus was the plants in the yard are finally starting to move beyond the newly-planted-and-shocked stage, and are starting to grow and look established.  The majority of the credit goes to the native plants that are large and healthy.

And that was two weeks ago. Since then, a number of the plants are starting to bloom and prosper. Photos have to wait; I've got to get this out so I can go outside.

Go Native?

Few of the natives are in a showy blooming stage, but this year — what the heck — we like healthy green leaves so much that we're gratefully loving every one of our native plants, maybe even more than those we planted. Except the sand burrs, the cat tails, bermudagrass, and other non-native grasses. They are growing ferociously and would require us to give more time than is possible, so I've settled for just removing the larger sand burrs as they start to develop burrs. I could be out there now, but no, I have to write about it.

This ISN'T a photo of the bird I saw,
but resembles it.

Is it a Flycatcher?

I added a bird to my life list recently. It might be a Willow Flycatcher, which seems to be the closest match I find for bill length, foot color, eye ring, coloring and markings, and behavior. Unfortunately, it was silent while I watched.

The photos of all the other flycatchers that are reported to migrate through this area appear to be so similar that a misidentification is likely. It looked much like this one, though with an obvious yellow circle on its upper breast.

I am an inland bird snob.

What about Indoors?

Eventually, we have to go inside (sigh), where many, many tasks are waiting their turn to be done. Like cleaning. Yuck. Like hanging art in my office or the entry hall, which may have to wait for winter. But what about installing the kitchen cup hooks? We finally located the right size hooks in the right color, and then ignored for weeks the hooks and cups waiting on the counter. Finally, the time felt right to measure and install. Finding a workable angle for measuring was the hardest part, but I finally found the best way to approach the task. This worked quite well for drilling the holes, as well. Not counting the sawdust and its friend gravity.

Back Outside... Cement?

It took threats and bribes, but we finally have our concrete hot tub pad in and ready for the next steps — electricity, water, screening, and the tub, though I've learned that expecting a certain order can be unrealistic. Getting an electrician is near impossible, and their work will be harder than you might guess, because the line has to run from the house out to the back yard. And it has to be in a plastic pipe buried 18" deep. And run through one of well-established slopes full of plants. I'll be carefully digging that trench after transplanting the unfortunates in its path. I'll leave the trench digging along the garden walkway to the hired help, a furpiece. 

I neglected to mention the new concrete ramp from the back "porch" down to the pathway (bottom left in the photo above). 

Here's a little image I did on FB for my North Carolina friend, Nancy. You can almost see the buried wine bottles that make the border. 

Time is up. I must go outside now. There's transplanting to do. And shoveling sand.

Milestones and Progress

Progress, Meeting Milestones, Encouraging Tomorrows

These are exciting and rewarding times. 

Planting Potted Plants — Done

We've finally planted ALL the seedlings and cuttings we moved here. 

Big, big sigh. Starting with an original 800 pots a couple of months before we moved, losing a quarter to shock before they were planted, and giving away several dozen fragile susceptibles once we recognized their survival odds, we're so relieved to move beyond the yet-to-plant stage. No more guilt that anyone is left suffering in a pot in the corner, and we can all focus on doing our part to make lives successful.

A Tree Planted — Done

Take for example one of our recent plantees, currently our largest, a tree. (Let's not talk about the 8' duranta tree we planned as a focal of the back yard.) This is a plumeria from my master gardener friend, Jessica, who gave this to us in early spring 2014.  It's hung in there in a relatively smallish, temporary pot that wanted to be watered daily. And now it's blooming happily. Jessica will be happy. Hopefully, its few brown, burnt leaf edges are just the familiar shock stage it's going through, and new leaves will arrive and stay simply green. 

 To Baby Them or Not to Baby Them

We've now officially abandoned the philosophy of our native-purist friends who preach No Soil Additives, who claim plants will eventually stop growing once their roots venture beyond the additive, and should learn the reality of their environment from the start. They claim plants should either take what nature provides or die. Too many of ours choose door number two, so now we're doing a series of additives that include compost, peat, and expensive flower-saver dust that's supposed to prevent the shock of going into our quick(death)sand. Our results vary. The toxic composition to some extent affects essentially everything that wasn't born here.

These are a few that were NOT babied with anything other than water and toxic sand, and yet still are willing to reward us with their color.

Finally, one of the Pride of  Barbados blooms (Caesalpinia pulcherrima) accompanied by two Yellow sohora (Sophora tomentosa)   One of the stronger lantanas in pink and orange Native volunteers who joined the palm somewhere in the past More volunteers Pentas and sweet potato vine continue to expand their friendship I'm so pleased my that two of the three red lantanas my mom gave me are blooming, even if leaves are sparse

I didn't remembering having a native Turk's Cap! (Malvaviscus drummondii) One of two lone survivors out of more than a dozen, a Rock Rose (Pavonia lasiopetala) Numerous Mexican ruellias who self-seeded into pots of supposedly more desirable plants that died bring us gorgeous purple Another one at a different time of day The plumbago had a hard adjustment but won't give up, putting out a flower every now and again My white curse strikes again... this crepe myrtle was a volunteer in Austin five years ago, though there were no white ones visible in the neighborhood

Big Progress in Path and Circle Bed Definition

This is a very exciting topic because it involves the actual form and configuration of the yard. You recall one of our first pre-move yard tasks was designing a circle bed in a back corner, and after using little flags to mark the form and shape, then using marking spray paint, we've now had the time to move on to adding sand berms and river rocks to define all the outlines. 

In a mailing in my inbox today, I saw this affirming line: 

Psychological studies on design find that curves and rounded shapes elicit stronger positive emotions than do straight lines and hard corners. Rounder forms are linked to feelings of relaxation and areas of the brain associated with reward. 

Said outlines now also define most of the pathways. Odd looking so far? Perhaps to you. 

Glorious to us. Watching structure be born and evolve is spectacularly satisfying.

It was a Wild Critter Weekend

Besides toads and birds, we don't get too many close encounters with the wild things that wander here. This weekend brought us slightly closer than usual to two regular visitors.

Meet Critter One
It started early Saturday morning just after midnight. I woke to Ray waking me by taking hold of my feet as he stood at the end of the bed, startling me from a perfectly nice dream. He said, "I need your help. There's something in the garage." Ray is never the waker and always sleeps later than I do by one to three hours, so this unusual situation was cause for notice. Not to mention that something in the garage is generally a reason to pay attention in most any situation. My first question clarified an important distinction, "Is it a person?" and, "No, I think it's a critter of some kind." 

How bad could this be? Not a toad, not a bird, so that leaves... wait a minute. Remember those raccoon prints I saw yesterday on the garage floor in the powdery dust the electrician made when he added wiring for an additional outside light? Clearly, a raccoon had wandered in — fine — and then hid behind a box and got trapped there once the doors were down. Now that we've cleaned out nearly all the unpacked boxes and moved the cars in, it ought to be simple for two of us to locate it and chase it out. Let's go.

We go downstairs and stand ready at the door to the garage. "Let's open the garage doors, get in there, and start chasing. Ready, go...." In we go and THERE'S THE RACCOON! It's a slim, young adult, races across the floor, attempts to get away by climbing one side of the metal tracks the garage door rolls up, and as it reaches the ceiling... it jumps into the hole in the ceiling the electrician made and didn't close up, and disappears!

We both simultaneously let out a very, very long "Ooooooooh!," both sadly knowing that this situation just became very much more complicated.

We leave the garage door open about a foot and go back to bed, hoping it will make its exit, but noise a while later lets us know it isn't done with us. We raise the door to two feet, making the outside more attractive, we hope, and go back to bed. What else was there to do? Perhaps put back the things it had knocked off of shelves, or restack my hundreds of carefully size-sorted and stacked plant pots that lay in a jumbled mess across the floor? 

This is NOT our raccoon, but is as cute as ours was.

Fast forward more than 12 hours later and we've bought a humane critter trap (which coincidently happened to be on sale at the local Tractor Supply store), Ray has set it up, and I've helped place it into a tight surrounding of boxes and heavy things that keep the critter from reaching from the side through the bars to steal the cat food bait without going inside. (I've seen nice raccoons in action before when Liz's visiting cats spent the night on the front porch in a wire cage.) We go to bed, we sleep, no more noise, no disarray. Oh good. Looks like we no longer have a critter, but we have a nice trap for next time. A happy ending for all involved.


Meet Critter Two
We'd seen evidence of this bothersome second critter in our yard on several occasions, which we'd anticipated for years before even moving in, knowing it and its kin live in abundance all along the islands. This one didn't come inside, but I was about as close to it as the nice raccoon as I went out to discourage it that same morning.

Imagine the scene. It's Sunday morning and I've been sleeping a little while after the excitement of the raccoon. Suddenly, I hear a noise and jump out of bed to go chase the raccoon again. But wait, the noise is Ray in his office -- he couldn't sleep and has been trying to be quiet so I could rest. I get him to take a turn going back to bed and, knowing from experience that I won't be able to sleep again, I go into the kitchen, drink hot tea, and find things on my computer to run my eyes over. I get so tired of that nonsense that I think surely I can sleep because I can't clearly can't think. The sky is bright, but a morning nap could help get me to church, which I promised I'd do after taking the summer off. I start down the stairs and stop to look out at our slowly evolving yard. Little plants, some brown-leafed, some getting greener. The outline of a small berm of sand running alongside the interestingly-shaped beds that define their edges. The pile of noticeably grayer sand in the middle of a bed.  Wait, whaaat? And movement in the center. A critter, going down into a hole and coming back up with an armful of sand, which it pushes out into the bed. Its little brown head looks around each time it comes up, then back it goes for another load. A dreaded pocket gopher whose piles we've seen several times finally makes itself visible to our world.

We've seen the piles of sand all over the island, read about the little gophers and how annoying they are, the damage they can do eating plants, the way they can disfigure a yard. And there is ours, doing its annoying little job, almost completely covering the nice tropical milkweeds beside the hole. Wait... wasn't that particular milkweed bushier than that? Oh, little gopher has had some breakfast.

This is NOT our gopher, but is how ours looked.

I wouldn't want to hurt our critters, but I want to discourage this one. Just then, Ray gets up, so I point out the creature for his viewing pleasure, knowing he also wants to know all he can about those we share our property with. Then, as he watches, out I go and in it goes, hiding from me. (We like this reaction in our critters.) I turn on the hose and give the new tunnel a proper baptism... the water runs and runs, seemingly filling a swimming pool size void. Enough of that. Next comes a refilling of sand into the entrance and plenty of stomping, and though all of this is probably not at all anything more than an inconvenience for little gopher pal, the goal is to be annoying and discouraging. And I do thank it for the gift of the nice pile of sand to shore up the bed's border. 

The Plague of Egypt or We Love Our Zillions of Toads

We thought we'd have a single crop of toads after the winter rains came, but new batches keep joining the herd. From tiny little dot toads to cute thumb-sized versions to the four-inchers. When I join them at 4 a.m., they're everywhere and so appreciative of the drip from the overfull rain barrel (which collects AC condensation) and the bowls of water I provide. At least some seem to be Gulf Coast toads, Bufo valliceps, or Coastal-Plain toads, Bufo nebulifer, both of which seem to have light center back stripes. Which do you think they are? 

Usually, they just hop, though sometimes they hide in my clogs and surprise me, or just sit in the water. Once, there was a larger toad seemingly trying to eat a small one, which was large enough to have gotten firmly stuck in the mouth. Normally, I try to leave nature alone for fear of naively making a poor choice, but the big toad was trying to push the little one out, so I gave it a tiny helpful pull on a wigglying foot, and ploop, off they went in their separate directions. Life before dawn is full of adventure. And groups of prowling toads are preferable to coyotes, at least that's my current position.

Live free or die

If you missed the explanation last time, many of the plants we've bred this past year or so and moved here have died from stress while waiting for our truckloads of sand to be shaped into a yard. Or we planted them and they died from salt shock. This includes most of the small, healthy little lantanas we recently bought in an end-of-spring closeout. Sad. They must have had the salt-tolerance bred out of their ancestry, so they've chosen the latter choice of New Hampshire's infamous Live Free or Die motto -- death. Or maybe their roots will revive in September and at least a few will bounce back. We're giving them water and the rest is up to them. Ya gotta be tough lantanas, or we'll rip you out of the ground. (Actually, we won't. We'll leave the roots to hold the sand in place.) Here's one of the rare ones that is not giving up.

Living Free

Here are several others that are doing OK.

Hidden within the nice blanket flower (imported from the continent, not the island native variety) is a tiny Mexican fan palm, Washingtonia robusta, we dug from a friend's yard, which then lived in a tiny pot for a year. Small, stunted, brown-tipped, but accepting the challenge of its new life. This small set of our purple trailing lantanas, Lantana montevidensis, which I thought we'd have everywhere, is doing quite well. I still want a couple of hundred of these to cascade down the slopes. Another trailing lantana, a store-bought gold one of two Ray came across and surprised me with. It and its sibling love it here and never even blinked when they tasted the salty sand. Ray's pentas, which — like the dollar lantanas — came from the markdown rack, but are holding up without a care. Wait... are these pentas or am I confusing them? Is this a green thread, Betty? I did a 7-mile nature walk on Austin's Onion Creek back in the day and the master naturalist leader referred to them as ADYFs. Another damn yellow flower.

A gift from my mom years ago and planted in Austin, we ripped this red lantana from the ground to make the move south with us. It and its two siblings were was doing great until we realized their roots had snuck out into the ground. They never forgave us from putting an end to that, and pouted for the next two years. This one seems to have made it while its two sisters found the salt to be the final insult.  This Oyster plant looked gorgeous all winter and then suddenly began losing leaves and almost died when spring came. As soon as it felt the sand around its roots, it was reborn and is delighted with its new life. We could use more of this keeper. Ray read a gardening column in the Sunday newspaper and was reminded of this plant he likes, a sweet potato vine. Beware a man with a credit card. This is one of two and was taken a couple of weeks ago, so now they've doubled in size. One has grown considerably toward the wind, which occasionally likes to flip it over like a bad comb-over. The most noticeable of all island natives, the silverleaf sunflower,  Helianthus argophyllus. They grow to 7' tall and get close to that in width. This one is now about 3' tall, which is close to as large as I let ours get. I remove their lower limbs, which makes them more tree-like, then shorten them into an oddly shaped bush. I want their sand-stabilizing roots, but don't like their encroachment style.

Why Kill Expensive Trees?

We had planned on purchasing three tall, expensive palm trees to give our front yard a mature look, but if past behavior predicts future behavior, we feared we'd possibly be risking their lives to the dreaded salt-death. It's heartbreaking to watch free seedlings die, but killing store-bought trees that cost muchos dineros and involve additional delivery and planting charges brings on emotions beyond sadness. 

Instead, we decided to take advantage of a mid-summer palm inventory-reduction we wandered into, and brought home a half-dozen young Mediterranean palms marked down from between $100-220 to $10. What fun we had planting the first three by the light of the full moon before dawn. It was noticeably more fun than planting the other three after work when the Death Star was giving its final pre-setting blast. 

See them looking like three little asterisks on the far right of this photo (taken from the third level looking toward the street). To the left of the palms are several yuccas and thornless cactus. The other two groupings mid-picture and towards the left are Washington robusta palms. See the row of little circles above the curve of the dry creek bed in the front-left quadrant? It's a ribbon of Agave americanas, aka century plants, of varying sizes, most of which were rescued from their mother's stalk, prematurely cut while the pups were still underdeveloped and rootless, carelessly thrown to the curb. The second such ribbon is to the right of the driveway. Ribbons are helping take care of the 200+ plants I could never get rid of after saving them. Please don't let them all bloom the same year or you'll be able to see them from the moon.

Hey Jude, Hey Sister Soul Sister, Hey-Ho

After each planting session, we add a layer of hay around each plant and its surrounding slope to protect its sand from the dreaded erosion brought about by the rain gods, Zeus or Jupiter or whomever is reported to be in charge. Or maybe it's the goddess of sand, Psamathe, who might be watching over it.

See the goldish hay, only partially covering the yard so far. This photo shows the other three Mediterranean palms on the far, with cactus on their right, and more Washington palms. Native volunteers are bottom center.

We've done other planting alongside the east side of the house, but they're to small to be seen from the third level.


The last two photos of the day.

The house p.m. shadow

The house a.m. shadow