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…

  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…

  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…

The largest toad in the world calls the extreme south of Texas home. The cane toad (Rhinella marina), also known as giant toad, neo-tropical toad or marine toad, is a large land toad native in the Rio Grande Valley, south to Mexico and into Central and South America. Cane toads are in the Bufonidae family…

  The results are in. Everyone can breathe a sigh of relief, and also applaud themselves for helping the Lower Valley reach an amazing 10th place for “Most Species” in a steep competition that involved 68 of some of the largest cities in the world! YAY, all the Texas Master Naturalists who took up the…

  It’s time to start mowing — but wait! Don’t mow this:   Or this:   Both Texas thistle and red poppy start out as large, flat-to-the-ground, rosettes. Texas thistle can reach to two feet or more in diameter; an individual leaf can be 18 inches long. The rosette of the red poppy is smaller,…