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05/29/2023 blooming!

A plantain flowering in the tiered cactus planter. This one was in the soil from Jeanne’s spike-moss.
The Hedeoma is blooming in the planter too!
Paula noticed this sneaky Prairie Coneflower blooming!
Some sunflowers near Leon’s blackberries have wavy edged leaves. We are hoping they might be Helianthus petiolaris.
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05/28/2023 haircut

Since it was going to rain this afternoon (and did! I think we got around a quarter inch at most), I gave the culinary sage and lemon balm both haircuts to encourage bushier growth.
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Fuzzy bean or other bean?

05/21/2023. Legume leaves in the backyard, of unknown origin.
05/27/2023. The adult leaves are more triangular than the fuzzybeans in the front yard, but it also gets less sun here.
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05/24/2023 rainbow

Purple: culinary sage and ‘Diane’ Salvia greggii. Blue: perennial blue flax. Green: milkweeds. Yellow: two leaf senna. Orange: butterfly milkweed. Red: the Southern Flame Dwarf Peach leaves.

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Dayflower identification redux

Last summer I made an attempt at identifying the dayflowers (Commelina species) in our yard and the only ones I found were the invasive, human-introduced Commelina communis. However, Abby gave us some native Commelina erecta and this year we noticed some of the dayflowers had thinner leaves like on the ones she gave us. So I decided to take a look again.

This is the invasive and human-introduced Commelina communis. The spathe is the green envelope that surrounds the flower. On this one, on the back edge is opens all the way down to the connecting stem.
This is one of the native Commelina erecta. This is not one that Abby brought us but hers looked like this too. Here, you can see the spathe is not open down to the stem. Instead it’s like a folded piece of paper, continuous, on the back side that goes to the stem.

It seems like for our yard, the broad vs narrow leaves are pretty indicative. So we’re going to continue pulling the broad leaved invasive ones. The Flora of North Central Texas indicates the native C. erecta has three varieties and one is narrow leaved, so the leaves probably don’t work in all regions. Once some of the dayflowers go to seed I will check to make sure they also have the smooth seeds that C. erecta has. I’m pleased to see we have more of the native species than I expected.

Even though the two species look very similar, the native species will have existing ecological and evolutionary relationships with the other plants and animals and microbes here. The human-introduced species may or may not have those. To be a good neighbor, I want to make sure our yard provides maximal food and shelter to local species, which means keeping more plants with those existing relationships.

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05/27/2023 backyard before and after

All the pulled invasive dayflowers and bermudagrass was piling up on the path by the mini prairie.
Since we had guests coming this evening for an outdoor meal I swept everything and pulled up some of the endless maple seedlings that were sprouting too. This shows off the tepary beans starting to climb the trellis too!
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05/27/2023 front yard

The rainbow garden is almost there.
The winecups have gotten MASSIVE. I have never seen such mammoth winecup leaves in the wild.
A typical winecup with regular sized leaves. We saw this one today on our afternoon walk, at Saxon Park.
A view panning over to see the Salvia greggii and coreopsis too. All the white flowers in the raised beds are cilantro. If you’ve been looking at our iNaturalist feed, the cilantro flowers are hopping with insect activity.