“Duuuuuude! It’s time to go tubin’!” Make sure everything is waterproof, find the sunglasses that you don’t mind possibly losing as you go through the Tube Chute, find out what size cooler is allowed on the river this year, and then rent inner tubes for yourself, all your buddies, and of course one for the cooler (unless you’re cool enough to own your own tubes). The city of New Braunfels is synonymous for any fun-loving Texan with summertime tubing on the river or, if you don’t mind standing in line, Schlitterbahn Waterpark Resort. There’s lots of water, lots of sun, lots of people watching, and it’s the highlight of a lot of summers.
But not for Ferdinand. For Ferdinand Jacob, or F. J. to those in the know, New Braunfels was a place where he could finally stop and put down some roots and get to down to the serious botanizing that he loved. Ferdinand was educated at the University of Wiesbaden, the University of Jena, and the University of Bonn. He moved to Frankfurt and took a teaching position at the Bunsen Institute. Things were going all right for young Ferdinand. But then he looked around himself and didn’t like what he saw. It was Germany in 1827, and Ferdinand thought that things ought to change. Unfortunately for him, most of his colleagues and family, and more importantly to his safety, the government, thought differently. By 1834, Ferdinand was active in agitating for reform of the German government, and found himself so much at odds with everyone around him that he split the scene and left for the United States. He first went to Belleville, Illinois to live with a group of other German expatriates. From Illinois he traveled by boat to New Orleans. From New Orleans, he started for Texas, but in an effort to escape some violent Indian activity, got diverted to Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, where he collected plants and insects for just over a year. Once again, Ferdinand headed for Texas, but wound up shipwrecked near Mobile, Alabama. By the time he finally got to San Jacinto, Texas, it was the day after the final battle in the Texas Revolution. After all that traveling, Ferdinand Lindheimer finally established a residence in a German colony known as New Braunfels, Texas. Once established, the “Father of Texas Botany” collected fifteen hundred species of plants in South Texas over the next thirteen years.
No reports are made on whether or not he went tubing in the river, but I like to think of him in a full-body swimsuit with water drops caught in his crazy beard as he whooped it up in the river with bottles of homemade beer he kept cool in the Comal.
Here we have the infamous 1843 tube trip down the river undertaken by those mad-men of botany Ferdinand Lindheimer, George Engelmann, Asa Gray, and Thomas Drummond. Everything was fine until they found a rope swing. The lesson here is that there’s a fine line between fun and all-out crazy.
There are 48 species and subspecies and one genus that carry Lindheimer’s name. Most of these are plants that you see every day (or in some cases, every time it rains). Lindheimer named many of these species after acquaintances, or after the their native location. Then there are those named for Ferdinand Lindheimer, or to honor his accomplishments.
One of the biggest and baddest grasses for our area is the ‘Big Muhly’, or Lindheimer Muhly. Muhlenbergia lindheimeri makes a huge, hulking clump that gets up to seven feet tall and six to seven feet wide, with large greyish-white plumes for flowers set against the blue-grey foliage. The flower-heads start out mahogany-purple, and turn a soft grey. It’s a tough, drought tolerant grass that makes a good replacement for Pampas Grass. ‘Big Muhly’ will grow where others fear to tread, making itself at home in hot, dry, rocky locations.
‘Whirling Butterflies’ is likely not the name that Ferdinand Lindheimer assigned to Gaura lindheimeri, though it’s an accepted moniker now. Gaura is an airy plant with red-tinged leaves and pink/white flowers. Gaura can easily take the full, hot sun, but will also grow and bloom steadily away in part shade. It gets up to two to three feet tall and wide, and blooms throughout the spring, summer and fall. It’s a hardy perennial that’s comfortable in a dry, rocky spot, and will just keep adding more and more blooms until it freezes to the ground.
The Antique Rose Emporium, source of so many wonderful things, introduced a rose as part of their ‘Pioneer Rose’ series called ‘F. J. Lindheimer’. This is a hardy shrub with full, yellow-orange blooms all year. Reports are that this rose even made it through hurricane Gustav in Louisiana, springing right back up after getting flattened in the storm.
Lindheimer, in his years of botanizing in Texas, recorded enough species of plants to literally fill a book. There are hundreds that we see around us all the time, familiar plants that got a little nudge and a name by our bud F. J. One that you can see just by walking down the block in many cases, or scouting around in any half-shaded woodsy area is ‘Turk’s Cap’. Malvaviscus drummondii is a chunky, large-leaved shrub that blends in to any woodsy spot until the dark red flowers appear, and then it’s impossible to ignore. ‘Turk’s Cap’ has a different kind of bloom, with the petals staying furled around the stamen and looking more like a weird little balloon than a flower. ‘Turk’s Cap’ gets up to four feet tall and five feet wide, and comes back dependably every spring.
Lindheimer probably didn’t have to go too far to find a Bald Cypress. These giant trees line rivers in Texas, reaching their massive roots down into the water to drink mightily from the cool waters of rivers like the Comal, the Guadalupe, and the Frio. Taxodium distichum can easily reach seventy to eighty feet tall. The feather-like leaves emerge bright green in the spring and persist through the summer. In the fall, they will turn bronze before they fall off.
One of the more easily recognizable characteristics of the Bald Cypress is the knees it produces with sufficient water. Though it doesn’t need a lot of water to survive, if it has it, the Bald Cypress will grow at an astounding rate, and often produce “knees”, or little humps of roots like perfectly camouflaged garden gnomes around the base. They’re really neat until you have to mow around them.
Lindheimer named quite a few plants after his fellow botanists; people like Thomas Drummond. One of those plants is a little lily that I look forward to every time it rains. Cooperia drummondii, the ‘Rain Lily’ only makes its appearance after a good soaking rain, so it’s not too common around here, especially lately. But as soon as the ground gets soaked, they pop up overnight, all over the place. There are places along my drive home that will be completely covered in one and a half inch, pure white blooms after summer showers. White seems to be the most common color, but I was very glad to see orange ones come up in my yard as well. So much so that whenever I see one while mowing, I’ll make a wide swath around it to let it go to seed. The little blooms are held up on naked stalks reaching six to ten inches tall, and they last for a day or so. The leaves will elongate after the bloom has faded away. Then you just have to wait for the next storm.
Ferdinand tromped all over three different states in the Unites States, and one in Mexico looking at plants and recording them so we’ll know just what to call them when we spot them along back roads throughout Texas. But another creature got the “Lindheimer Treatment”: the Texas Rat Snake, or Lindheimer’s Rat Snake. Elaphe obsoleta lindheimeri is a non-venomous snake that will hang out in barns and sheds and try to keep them rodent free for you, if you’ll leave them alone to do it. Lindheimer collected the first specimen of the Texas Rat Snake in New Braunfels. My experience with Rat Snakes is that they’re pretty skittish, and will zip away as fast as possible, usually disappearing into some hole you would have never seen otherwise. My other experience with the Rat Snake is that whenever I see one (because they always seem to surprise me), my brain short circuits for just a second and toggles back and forth between “good snake?” and “bad snake?” or “shoo it away?” and “run like crazy?”. I’ve read accounts from people who say the Texas Rat Snake is aggressive, but they sure never have been with me. Maybe that’s because I’m usually trying to get myself into reverse as fast as possible.
Apparently, they’re pretty acrobatic, too.
There are actually a couple of great, or at least really interesting, books about Ferdinand Lindheimer. One is Life Among the Texas Flora: Ferdinand Lindheimer's Letters to George Engelmann, a collection of letters written by Crazy Beard himself. George Engelmann, who was so cool he got a daisy named after him, along with Asa Gray, wrote another. It has one of those titles that really reaches right out and grabs you: Plantae Lindheimerianae: An Enumeration of F. Lindheimer’s Collection of Texas Plants, With Remarks and Descriptions of New Species, etc. Oh yeah, they did it; they used “etc.”. That’s what keeps you turning the pages.
