More Plants Blooming Now

Indian blanket, Mexican hat and Purple horsemint in the Willowbrook Reach prairie

The native wildflowers are in full swing this year, aided no doubt by the extra irrigation that we're giving everything as part of the Phase I restoration project.

Mexican hat stands tall in the Willowbrook Reach prairie

We had the pleasure of hosting a field trip this past Saturday for the Native Plant Society of Texas - Austin Chapter. It was so great to have such an esteemed group of native plant lovers walking through our greenbelt. Many thanks to Matt Turner and his friends for the great conversation and helping us to identify many previously unknown plants. Here are few below (all native to Central Texas!!):

Cainagre dock

Texas vervain

Silver bluestem

Dayflower

American germander

Coma

Coma

Poverty weed or false willow

Prairie verbena

Hierba de Zizotes or Longhorn milkweed

American basketflower

Purple horsemint

Remember: Nature is all around us and all we have to do is stand still for a bit and watch it unfold before us!

Recommended reading:

Remarkable Plants of Texas: Uncommon Accounts of Our Common Natives. Matt Turner. UT Press.
Wildflowers of the Texas Hill Country. Marshall Enquist.

What's Blooming Now

Mid-spring is a great time to be walking the Reach, which is full of blooming perennials. Almost every day, there is something new to see. Here are a few of the things you can see blooming right now:

Blue-eye Grass

Indian paintbrush (red) and pink evening primrose (pink)

Indian blanket

Rain lilly

Greenthread (Thelesperma filifolium)

Texas lantana (red and yellow) blooms among the sensitive briar (purple)

Sensitive briar

Engelmann's or cutleaf daisy

Leaves of the cutleaf daisy

Columbine

Pink variety of rain lilly

Pink evening primrose

Phlox

Bordered patch butterfly (Chlosyne lacinia) on the zexmenia (Wedelia texana) in the butterfly garden. This butterfly's larvae host on ragweed (of which we have plenty) and sunflowers (of which we just planted).

Seed Sharing

There is an exciting to development and potential future partnership that is shaping up at the Willowbrook Reach. Yesterday, a few of us met with Minnette Marr from the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. Minnette is a plant biologist and seed conservationist, and collects seeds from native plants from around Central Texas.

Minnette has begun the process of providing us with wild, native seeds that have been collected from just around Central Texas - from within our "seed shed" - that are appropriate for a habitat like the Reach. Some of them are even relatively rare plants.

The Wildflower Center has an enormous bank of native seeds, and Minnette said they would like to begin sharing those with groups like ours that are committed to restoring native plants back to their place within our ecosystems. This is just a very beginning.

We will likely spread a few of these seeds on our forthcoming workday and Clean Sweep Day, Apr 8.

This is very exciting, and another step forward in our mission to bring even greater numbers of pollinators, birds, flowers and native fruits and plants to our neighborhood!