Author: Anita Westervelt
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Anita’s Blog — Moths are Important!
Extra! Extra! In honor of National Moth Week — here’s a little extra about the importance of moths and plants to consider for a Moth Garden!
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Surprises along the edge of the road
The City Nature Challenge 2021 has come and gone. More than 1,270,000 observations were uploaded to the www.iNaturalist.org database from individuals in 419 cities from 44 countries worldwide. The challenge is in its sixth year and the fourth year that the Lower Rio Grande Valley participated. This year, 146 local participants logged 7,966 observations of…
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Horridulum — what kind of name is that for a pretty plant?
Latin plant names, we’ve learned, often clue us in about the nature of a plant. See Eileen Mattei’s article, page 13, “Enough Latin Names to be a TMN,” at the December 2020 Chachalaca newsletter: https://rgvctmn.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/The-Chachalaca-Winter-2020.pdf The Latin word horridulum isn’t as bad as it looks; it translates to: “somewhat rough; unadorned,” according to latin-is-simple.com. The word Cirsium derives from the Greek…
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What to do with a lot of June bugs
Growing up in Kansas, it was kind of fun to see a couple of June bugs bumping against the porch light in the evenings. I knew they wouldn’t hurt me, because my momma said so, and with the arrival of June bugs, I knew summer — and my birthday month — had definitely arrived. As…
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Anita’s Blog — Anything But Dull
Don’t you often wonder what people must be thinking when they give a name to something? Often there’s great mystery surrounding a name — until you delve into what something does, is or how it behaves — moths are no different . . . . Check out this new blog post and get ready for…
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Nightshades — a family of plants as infamous as it is famous
Published in McAllen Monitor June 19, 2021. From delicious to dangerous — beware the shady side of the local nightshade plants . . . .