Tag: rescue

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11/26/2023 minor plant miracle!

My seemingly giant finger pointing at a very tiny sprig of green emerging from an otherwise gray stem.
I was examining the stems and base of the two scarlet peas we dug up in early fall from the doomed prairie (sold for building on) in town. I’ve been watering both since we moved them. Today I noticed a tiny green shoot emerging from one stem of one plant! I’m going to try to grow this species from seed too but it’s nice to know at least one made it.
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06/11/2023 straggler photos

A seedling Virginia creeper. This is by the dining room window.
At the rescue prairie today I took a clump of Cladonia (probably C. peziziforma?) reminder: we only took wild organisms because the land is slated to be built on, and with permission.
And some adjacent moss. Both the lichen and the moss were on sand at the base of a tree, shaded, so I put them in the concrete blocks (for good drainage) in the shady end of the prairie.
Paula has worked hard to remove bermudagrass and other non native intruders from our buffalograss at the edge of our property. She seeded it a few days ago. Today I connected the soaker hose that she had laid out.
The hose was a bit too long so I looped the extra by the Mexican sage and showy milkweed.
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06/11/2023 roots

Unless you’re taking a herbarium specimen or moving stuff in the garden, we often don’t see how deep some native plant roots are. Today I helped two friends rescue plants from a remnant prairie that is about to be dozed and built on. (We dug with permission.)

A Winecup had the taproot I’ve read about but it was concentrated near the surface. This seems likely to live.
I figured this big milkweed has a very deep root so we didn’t try it.
Briar sat in the shade of encroaching cedar trees and helped check the reference book.
A cute hopper insect!
The Pediomelium/Psoralea type legume had a long thin root. The end broke so we shall see if it lives.
Scarlet pea had a very long root. Again we’ll see how it grows!

Spiderworts, native perennial dayflower, an all yellow Gaillardia, fleabane, western horse nettle, and Heterotheca (I think?) all came up easily with a sharpshooter shovel. Little bluestem has very deep roots but I think they are supposed to be okay to divide. Fern acacia (I think??) had a longer root (over a foot for a 6” tall plant) that may have broken.

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05/10/2023 Tuberous Texas dandelions!

We noticed a nearby construction site had Pyrrhopappus (called Texas dandelions, false dandelions, or desert-chicory) right where they were going to get run over and graded. We got permission to dig some up to rescue them. This plant is from the first night of digging, blooming the next day (05/10).
You can see we discovered these were the tuber-bearing perennial species on 05/09/2023 (the first digging night).
You can see here Briar standing just outside the disturbed soil. My hand is pointing at one of the plants.
You can see the tubers for which this perennial species is named! The other species of false dandelions are annuals or biennials. I assume most of the ones we dug, if not all, are perennials based on that every one where we cleared the soil off had a tuber.
We got quite a few from the edge of the construction area. The neighboring land has more of the plants so I imagine they will repopulate.
05/11/2023 this is one of the transplanted dandelions. They have been blooming!