Sort of.
Once you get past the tender excitement of youthful infatuation, a new blank journal, fire crackers, the smell of summer rain, exceeding the speed limit, or pie, you settle down to what historically has been called "happiness." It's not exciting. So much not so that most people trade it in for misery every chance they get.
But somewhere between excitement and happiness is a light version of the two called "jocundity." June is that way. It's not heavy. Not even under 104 degrees. It would be happiness, but there's not enough chance of rain for that. And it's not excitement, lying here somewhere near the middle of the calendar, just past our spring semester's climax, and nowhere near "the" holidays.
It's a month I like, despite our drought and crunchy brown grass. Despite a disappearing creek.
This will be a short entry, but I mainly wanted to include some recent notes and photographs from Harlin. When duties on the ambulance and efforts at remodeling the Hog Shop slow a bit, I want to play catch-up by posting lots more from HH's observations, cataloging, and photographing.
My visit to your creek yesterday was good. I started off pessimistic and I was skeptical I would find very much. It is hot and it is dry. You may think my final positive assessment is somehow due to my initial low expectations. However, I found stuff that I found interesting and haven’t at this point experienced any negative reactions.
The interesting stuff is maybe partly because of the flowing creek. There are still flowers that can be named just by thumbing through the field guide. I’ve included photographs of the three I found: Lygodesmia texana (skeleton plant), Palafoxia, and Melia azedarach (Chinaberry).
Also, I made a gastronomical experiment that, while somewhat negative, does count as a new experience. I left my mostly full cup of green tea on the picnic table whist communing with nature. Later, when I was about to eat a pear before leaving, I noticed a bunch of ants crawling around the black plastic top. Wow, I thought, they sure got to that top in a hurry. Then I thought, Wait a minute; those ants appear to have been here for a while.
Peering into the cup there was this nice raft of ants. I guess my reaction was somewhere between a vague memory that people have eaten ants on the one hand and my cultural upbringing on the other hand. My other hand was the one that had ants crawling on it and the thought was something like “Boy, you ain’t gonna let a few ants bother you, are you?” So, I tried the Lipton’s au pismires. And, in my opinion, the ants don’t really add anything to the tea, but maybe detract a might. The slightly negative verdict may be due to my drifting away from my roots, though.
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| Skeleton plant (Lygodesmia texana) |
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| Palafoxia |
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| Chinaberry (Melia azedarach) |
When I use dichotomous keys as self-guided tours of nature’s wonders, I tend to suppose that it is not likely that I will find anything personally noteworthy and yet there is something personally noteworthy so often that I wonder how my expectations get set. In this case, and for me, one of the noteworthy parts of the journey was that I had difficulty believing my expectations were wrong.
A few weeks ago we found Mentzelia oligosperma in the creek bed. I may have seen this plant in the distant past, but I can’t remember and thus I expect examples of Mentzelia to be rare. Yesterday, I found leaves with those dramatic crystalline Christmas-tree ornament hairs and I thought that I must be looking at a different stage of what we’d seen before. After all, what are the odds there would be two plants from my self-determined rare genus in the same place and at the same time? But the more I looked the more I felt this was different than before.
I have mentioned that vague, ambiguous characteristics add challenge to identification puzzles. In this case, the key asks if there are ten things that look like petals as opposed to five things that look like petals. Hmmm, …, five versus ten is pretty definite. There is certainly no wishy-washy equivocation with that question. Although you can’t see the petals very well in my photographs [first and second photos below] it is easy to see that there does seem to be more than five petals and that the petal-like parts are different (and when I got home I counted 10). I included a photograph of M. oligosperma also taken yesterday so it will be easy for you to compare.
I notice there is only one kind of Mentzelia listed in the Balconnes plant list, but it sure looks to me like you have two kinds. No one else might find it surprising that there are two kinds of Mentzelia growing interspaced with each other, but thanks to not remembering ever seeing one of these plants before, I did find it surprising.
I’m attaching a close-up picture of the sticky hairs of M. albescens, a better picture than my previous sticky hairs photo I think.
hh
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| Mentzelia albescens |
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| Mentzelia albescens |
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| Mentzelia albescens |
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Stickleaf, Chicken-thief, Beggar's patches, Pegajosa (Mentzelia oligosperma)
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Entwined in sheep's wool, the leaves can lower the wool's market value." http://www.kswildflower.org
(in case anybody was wondering)
