On a few small acres in the hill country of central Texas, we live by watching, feeling, and waiting. Together, we come to know by loving and love best when we care enough to understand. Our Loves: limestone, leaf-vein, scales, feathers, friends, and all their shifting reflections in the waters of a small Creek.
Showing posts with label snow-on-the-mountain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label snow-on-the-mountain. Show all posts
Redstripe ribbon snake (Thamnophis proximus rrilineatusub) belly is bigger than its mouth. The leopard frog (Rana) got away after a half-hour struggle.
Ah, yes.
Those blue eyes....
Fox scat on the trail down to the Pond.
Palafoxia (Palafoxia callosa) is the most ubiquitous flowering plant
down in the stone-field of the dry creek bed.
Zexmenia (Zexmenia hispida)
Golden-Eye (Viguiera dentata)
.
Golden-Eye (Viguiera dentata) in big-bloom all over this country now.
Velvet-Leaf Mallow (Wissadula holosericea)
Velvet-Leaf Mallow (Wissadula holosericea)
Wood-Sorrel (Oxalis Drummondii)
Common Wild Petunia (Ruellia nudiflora)
Tube-Tongue (Siphonoglossa pilosella)
Texas Lantana (Lantana horrida)
Curlytop Gumweed (Grindelia nuda) with its sticky
leaves (growing mostly in the stonefield). Indians of the
Southwest would treat ant bites with a poultice made
from this flower.
Sometimes its tops are white instead of yellow.
Spittlebug (see 4 April, 2012 entry)
Snow-on-the-mountain
Tropical Sage (?)
Frostweed
So, daughter K. arrived last weekend with the solution to my paradox-of-choice. I wake in these cool mornings with too many projects, large and small. Stone walls to build. Stones to find. Stones to haul. Juniper to cut and burn. Soil to turn. Scrap to haul away. Pens to build. Steps to complete. Paint to paint. And because the list is so long, I am always paralyzed with the many options and then regretful into the first few minutes of the project because I can't forget the other projects I probably should have chosen instead.
That's when K. suggested that we write on slips of paper the individual projects and label them as "7-hour," "3-hour," and "1-hour" projects. We wad them up and stuff them into an empty cashew jar. Then when I have, say, a full day or most of a weekend's worth of time, I reach into the jar and blindly pull out any one of the 7-hour project sheets and get to work. This process eliminates the paradox-of-choice. I have no choice but the one slip's assignment.
At what hour the Creek ceased to flow is not known. Maybe creeks are special about not having a moment of death capable of being witnessed by us. A couple small pools and the main pool still have water and fish, but the flow has gone out of the stream, and with the loss of flow, so also the loss of a sound and a shine.
Looking southward down-unstream.
Exposed shale just up-unstream from the main pool.
Looking southward at the Pool.
A run of un-creek south of the Pool.
Up along the row of blackberry vines on the unnaturally thriving snow-on-the-mountain plant we've been looking at for several blog posts, I found this beautiful wasp-look-alike insect that may be a robber fly (Lampria bicolor). If you can correct this identification, please let us know.
And here we have an exploration of cinematography for the patient stone-watcher inside each of us. I stone-watched on the west side of the Un-Creek. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_lEmey6Lw
Harlin sent the following photographs and notes a few days ago.
We are in the realm of easily misidentified with these two plants, not to mention the non-spectacular. Still, they are different from the other plants which have been added to the Hamilton Creek plant list previously and that in itself is progress. HH
Canadian horseweed (Conyza canadensis)
Canadian horseweed (Conyza canadensis)
Fragrent flatsedge (Cyperus odoratus)
Fragrent flatsedge (Cyperus odoratus)
These two [below] are not only more colorful than the last two plants, but they have distinctive characters that rule out a large number of wrong possibilities. These characteristics are not guarantees, but finding something that seems to be rare is an enjoyable experience at the end of the find-a-name puzzle. In the example of the bean family vine Strophostyles, the unusual shape is that thing in the middle of the flower. I have a book about the legumes of Texas and the description for the genus Strophostyles says "keel strongly incurved." My picture looks similar to
The name "heterotheca" means something like "different cases" since the achenes for the ray flowers don't have the pappus of bristles and the disk flowers do have achenes with the bristly hair on top (along with some other differences). I've found that it is good to take a few non-pretty pictures along with the pictures that might look good. In fact, I usually feel I should have taken more of them. They help answer questions that my sometimes rushed preservation hasn't preserved. I mention that since in this case I also wish I had taken better pictures of the wild bean's keel and looked for good examples of the camphor weed's two kinds of seeds. Of course, I didn't even know what I was missing at the time. HH
Strophostyles seeds are generally found in sieve sizes greater than 2.0 mm. Occasionally, pods are found as well (see Fritz 1986). Strophostyles helvola is found in archaeobotanical samples from sites of both foraging and agricultural groups.
Description
The modern seeds are oblong with square ends, 5-10 mm long and 2-3 mm wide, with a grayish brown scurfy outer coat (Figure 1). The linear marginal hilum is covered with white and bordered by a narrow black outline. The pods are 4-9 cm long (Figure 2). Strophostyles helvola is easily identified archaeologically due to its long, diagnostic hilum. It is also longer and narrower than other legumes. Smaller fragments of bean make identification more difficult because they can be easily confused with other legumes, including Phaseolus vulgaris L. and Phaseolus polystachios L.
Archaeological Distribution
Strophostyles helvola is found from the Middle Archaic through historic times in the Eastern Woodlands. Archaeological wild bean has been recovered in Alabama,Oklahoma, the Arkansas Ozarks, and Illinois. It has been consistently recovered in the American Bottom area, generally in low numbers (Johannessen 1984). The Modern Plant and Its Distribution
There are three species: Strophostyles umbellata (Muhlenb. ex. Willd.) Britton,Strophostyles leiosperma (Torry & A. Gray) Piper, and Strophostyles helvola.Strophostyles helvola is a herbaceous annual vine found in a variety of habitats, including beaches, thickets, open woods, open areas and old fields. Smith (1992:261) records finding wild bean in association with Chenopodiumberlandieri which is not surprising given Chenopodium's need for nitrogen rich soil. Fritz also finds this association archaeologically in the Ozarks (1986). Strophostyles’ modern distribution is wider than its archaeological distribution. It is found from Quebec to Minnesota,South Dakota and Colorado, and south from Florida to Texas. Beans are available in the late summer and early autumn months.
Discussion
Although some archaeological occurrences of wild bean could be the result of natural seed dispersion, as it does grow in disturbed soils, "...it has been recorded in frequencies great enough that one can conclude with near certainty that it was used as a food" (Asch and Asch 1985:387). Wild bean is smaller than common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), but it has similar nutritional value. "Furthermore, because it is substantially larger than indigenous starchy seed cultigens, it may have had subsistence value greater than its numbers would indicate" (Parker 1991:314). Wild beans were probably prepared in many of the same ways as cultivated beans. Although they could be eaten green, they were often dried. Ethnohistorically, the roots were boiled and mashed and used for food as well (Yanovsky 1936:38).
The Houma used Strophostyles helvola as a disease remedy, with a decoction of bean being taken for typhoid. The Iroquois used it as a dermatological aid, with the leaves being rubbed on parts affected by poison ivy or warts (Moerman 1986).
Here is a great comparison photo below. I never knew that snow-on-the-mountain changed the white edges of its leaves and bracts during the period when its flowers are developing. The first photo of two blog entries ago shows the plant as the first flowers were blooming, and the one below displays the full-bloom stage of the leaves. Such a change obviously augments any of the flower's attempts to draw the attention of pollinating insects.
What might be a carpenter bee (Xylocopa) on snow-on-the-mountain (Euphorbia marginata)
When things out at the Creek get just too hot for us to work at anything productive (we hit 112 degrees yesterday), we take to the purely useless. Like stone-balancing.
I really didn't think that the Creek would still be wet this deep into the hot drought, but water continues to seep up into the upper stretch of the stream, and if not exactly working a brisk flow, it at least is able to keep up enough of a presence to sustain the usual Creek life.
The Pond continues creeping northward, away from us, now at a distance of about seventy-five feet from the original water-meter. I don't know, but this comes to about an eight-inch step per day, and down about four or five feet in actual elevation fall.
(The water-meter stick is hidden in the dry grasses bottom left.)
