November through February is tree-planting time in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. The perfect umbrella-shaped canopy of the potato tree, Solanum erianthum, caught my eye. All the Valley nature park butterfly gardens have one, so it must be important. I bought a small, shapely tree. Not one to accurately judge future spatial relationships, I planted…

For those interested in a small, colorful butterfly and hummingbird garden, I’ve listed what’s planted around my potato tree in a 10- by 30-foot plot (listed mostly by height, definitely not by girth of adult plants): Caesalpinia, Caesalpinia Mexicana – attracts hummingbirds and butterflies Potato tree, Solanum erianthum, — all sorts of fun. See “Consider…

The ever-changing disguises of dicliptera, Dicliptera sexangularis, make it a great candidate for the dodge and evade of spy work. The Thursday Ramsey volunteer team has displaced cart-loads of dicliptera since March. At first, there were a lot of questions, mostly, “Is this dicliptera?” “Yes,” we’d say. Cloaked in different attire throughout the year, it’s…

I stumbled onto a murder mystery series the year I joined RGVCTMN and the Arroyo Colorado Audubon Society. The protagonist is Bob White, an avid birder living in Minnesota, who adds spice to his birding adventures by finding dead bodies and then helping police solve the crimes. Jan Dunlap is the author. The series was…

Greg Storms was the first to point out the giant wasp while we prepped an area prior to planting our cache of zizotes, Asclepias oenotheroides, the milkweed at the new Zizotes Circle garden in Harlingen’s Hugh Ramsey Nature Park. “Tarantula wasp,” he said. We didn’t doubt him for a second — the thing was as…

  As the Thursday RGVCTMN crew of Ramsey Park volunteers finished a project, we ended up with a small clearing ready for re-vegetation. Before we could contemplate what to plant, a surprise visitor appeared. We saw him talking with Frank Wiseman, and then he was gone. However, he had kindly offered us some milkweed plants.…