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Dec 9

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Bluebonnet

The state flower of Texas, and the glory of the spring. No roadside or edge of a ranch, or even small garden like mine feels complete without them. Bluebonnets are diminutive lupines, but look stunning in mass. While they’re the essence of meadow in Texas, they’re also very pretty in carefully arranged garden beds.

Bluebonnets are sown in fall, and occasionally you can find them as nursery-grown annuals, but the seed is so widely available and easy to sow, that it’s worth it to always try some every year. Read more

Dec 4

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The Texas Bluebell, the Eustoma, or a tale of Latin Names

OK, just to get this out of the way, a little Latin lesson. Some days I feel like a gardener, and others a scientist. My husband calls it my right-brain/left-brain garden. When researching wildflowers, the first problem one gets into is in the matter of names. Flowers have different common names all over the world, and the more this world piles its information online, the more confusing it can get.

Latin names help us get this confusion out of the way, but I admit they are rather boring to most people, sometimes just down right goofy. The gardening world now persists in calling Ranunculus “ranunculus” rather than its much more fitting common name “Persian Buttercup”. But then, people might get Buttercup confused with Narcissus, which is what we called “Buttercups” as children where I grew up, and what others in the South call Jonquils or you call Daffodils. Ahh, never mind. Read more