Category: Anita’s blog

  Harlingen’s Hugh Ramsey Nature Park is still reaping benefits from the fall rains. December’s First Friday guided native plant walk around Ebony Loop was anything but boring! The recent cold snaps, and then subsequent warm weather, have urged a few pink mint, Stachys drummondii, into bloom at the entrance to Tom Wilson Garden. Generally…

Several years ago, I dedicated a partially dead mesquite tree as a natural trellis for a native climbing milk-weed (Funastrum cynanchoides). The vine traveled up the trunk and reached the highest branches by the second spring. Lovely globes of pink-edged white blooms peppered the vine in summer. Flowers turned into dangling, short fleshy tear-drops, like…

  November’s winding down. Thanksgiving feasts extended to the resaca this year, as flock-friends and their relatives arrived to partake of the water’s bounty. No less than 50 White Pelicans have been feasting. Although fun to watch and photograph, they can deplete the fish stores in a hurry. They really need to move along to…

  If ever there was a love/hate relationship, it’s with vines. Some people hate them while others think they’re pretty cool. I’m in that latter category. I like to know something’s value before I categorically pluck it out of the soil. It’s no different with vines. I try to research what they’re all about. It…

  It’s November and I’ve never seen so many butterflies in Harlingen’s Hugh Ramsey Nature Park! First Fridays (from now through May 2019) begin at 9 a.m. with a Guided Native Plant Walk around Ebony Loop — a one-quarter mile, level caliche trail in the above mentioned park. Every month is different because of what…

  September’s rain has done a tremendous favor for our fall kaleidoscope of butterflies. It’s created a burst of blooms in our native plant communities. More blooms, more butterflies. If you haven’t given this a thought, the opposite is true in drought years. No rain, no blooms, — butterflies go elsewhere to seek nectar in…