Dreams of Ice

Long, long ago in a land that for all practical purposes might as well be far, far away, it was not brutally hot.  No, really.  Think back… it was a time known as “February”.  It was a time when British towns were not being looted and Standard and Poor’s wasn’t quite so dismal.  Not only was it not so hot, it was cold.  It was really cold.  There were no leaves on the trees, but it wasn’t because of drought.  The landscape was bare and stark and the ground was rock-solid.  And then, one morning, we came to work here at the nursery to find fantastic scenes of alien worlds, fairy castles, and extravagant island resorts built by Middle-eastern sheiks.  There was ice, and not just a little.  Remember that?  Maybe you do.  Maybe you have a vague memory that you’ve started to assume was a really crazy, really vivid dream.  But it was real.  We know because we saw it, too, and we took pictures. 

This sprinkler stand was a column of ice all night, but as the sun struck it in the morning, I was able to catch that little drop of water coming off of the stalactite on the right in mid-drop.

 There’s this really cool succulent plant called Lithops, which kind of look like little round rocks that have been split in half.  These looked to me like Ice-Lithops.

Non-ice-Lithops

One of the best things about the ice was all the different and weird patterns it made. 

Grass in stasis

The frozen grass made a very satisfying crunch when stepped on, which presented us with a dilemma: stomp around in it and listen to the crunch, or leave it as pristine as possible as long as possible?

An ice-beard hanging off of one of the pots

Ice-roots

Ever read Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”?

 The ice has decided to colonize the pot, and is trying to put down a root to anchor itself there. 

It’s like these trunks started out as pure ice, but were slowly becoming real trees as they grew.  That ice is tricky stuff.

 Ice-falls.  If you were about two inches tall, this would be so awesome!

Poor frozen extremities of the Dwarf Yaupon Holly

 This is like a scene from a horror movie for plants.  This is the part where it’s nearly completely engulfed by the Ice-blob, and finally manages to stretch one small branch up and out of its icy clutches.  But the the Ice-blob bloorps up a little bit of itself to smother the Yaupon’s last hope for freedom.  This is the scene that makes little Yaupons want to sleep with the lights on, and make the Mommy Yaupon look under the bed and make sure there are no Ice-blobs hiding there. 

 

So how did we get all of that ice all over our plants?  With an ice-hose, of course.

A leaf's-eye view

Trapped behind a wall of ice.  Poor little plants.

This is a new variety of Texas Mountain Laurel we’re working on.  Gives you big clusters of ice-flowers all summer.  They smell like orange blossoms and taste like a frozen margarita.  You can either enjoy the flowers on the tree, or use them in your drink.  We expect this to be one of our best sellers

Is it live or is it Memorex?  Or is it just really blasted cold?

It was so cold the camera shutter stuck about halfway open.  But it did make kind of a cool effect. 

Is that a penny trapped under the ice?

 These little frozen blobs didn’t crunch like the frozen grass, but we couldn’t slide across them either.  We just sort of hobbled across while trying not to fall down.  Which was fun in its own way.

Jared's World

Christina's World

A frozen grass-blade's-eye view

Ice-a-saurus sculpture

Apparently wire fences stop ice formations.  This is useful information.

Ice-Nessie

Here are either reminders of the awful winter we all survived six months ago, or they’re images of relief while we all survive this awful summer.  In which case, you’re welcome. 

The Dead Cajun Tour

My wife’s mom’s family is from Louisiana, and that means absolutely everything you would think it would mean.  It means her Granny always has some gumbo or etouffee going in the kitchen.  It means that while the family sits around the table eating the gumbo or the etouffee, the conversation runs from the cousin who’s at LSU to the upcoming birthday of the priest of the local church to “Big Mike, you remember Big Mike?  Oh yeah, cher, you know, his brother used to live next door to the woman who used to sew the covers for the pews of the church.  She was the one that had the son who went into the army and married that real pretty Vietnamese woman, and they live over to Lafourche Parish now.  She runs a pet grooming business now and Lord but she talks so fas’ I can’t unnerstand a ting she say.”  It’s that kind of Cajun family (or Acadien family; there was some disagreement as to which is the more accurate term).  Several years ago, someone in the family gave my wife copies of old pictures of family members.  These are black and white, stiff cardboard pictures of Cajuns with straw boaters and parasols, having a picnic in a swamp somewhere, the Spanish moss cascading from the huge oak trees in the background.  We don’t actually know who these people are, just that they’re family, and that they were picnicking well before Henry Ford delivered his vision to the country. 

Lately, my wife has become interested in researching her family’s history, and finding more old pictures of Cajuns.  So we arranged to go visit her Granny in Louisiana, scan a bunch of old family photos, get the stories behind the pictures, and go find where a bunch of her distant relatives are buried.  Of course, it’s Louisiana, so any of those relatives that weren’t washed away in some flood or other were not so much buried as entombed.  Apparently caskets that are buried in Louisiana have a bad habit of floating down the street during a flood, so people there put their loved ones instead in an above-ground burial vault.  So over the Fourth of July weekend, instead of grilling hamburgers and drinking cold lemonade, we were prowling through old cemeteries in southern Louisiana and drinking lukewarm Gatorade.  But the names, oh man the names…

We had a list of names we were looking for, names of people we knew were in her family and that we were pretty sure were in the cemeteries we visited.  Some of the ones we searched for and found were Pierre-Jean Bourg, Jean Baptiste Charpentier, Michel Morvent, Eugene Robicheaux and Francois Sevin.  And that’s not seven, as in one more than six.  That’s say-vaugh as in “I’m so French I can completely ignore the last letter of my name.”  And then there were the names we saw and weren’t looking for, but were just too great to ignore.  Being a compulsive list-maker, I now have this awesome list of Cajun-French names.

My niece, Delilah, just turned one a few days ago.  Before she made the scene, my brother and his wife were searching for a name for her and decided they wanted an old-fashioned, more traditional, perhaps even retro name for her.  They went with Delilah- a fine and lovely name- even though I suggested Lula or Pearl.  Well, if little Delilah ever gets a littler brother or sister, I have a list of names for him or her that are real doozies. 

My folks named me Matt after a character on ‘Gunsmoke’.  Okay, that’s fine, but do you have any idea how many Matts were born in the early 70’s?  Lots and lots and lots.  But how many times are you in a public place and you hear “hey Ulinor” or “well if it isn’t Junius, you old sonofagun”?  Or say there’s a woman who, well- she has a great personality.  But her name is Etienne or Justillia or Clothile.  Or Eufrozine.  I mean c’mon, she’d have to have an eye in the wrong place or have too many ears not to be cool with a name like Eufrozine.  That’s just instant cool points. 

So we huffed and sweated our way through cemeteries that featured brilliant, freshly painted tombs and headstones at the front, and older, more ornate, crumbling tombs toward the back of the cemetery.  The new, clean white tombs were in perfectly straight rows, like a warehouse for, you know, dead Cajuns. 

Searching those tombs for names from the list of family names we had became some sort of an incredibly hot, tortuous march: step, step, look to the right, sweat, step, step, look to the left, sweat.  Between and behind the clean white tombs were the older graves and tombs that stood at odd angles, where weeds were allowed to grow around the grave markers…

…or even on them.

 These are the really interesting parts of the cemetery.  These older tombs and headstones (and here’s your plant tie-in) had a mosaic of moss and lichen growing on them. 

Spanish Moss dripped off of every tree surrounding the cemetery, and ferns grew out of cracks and in corners. 

Some of the really cool plants I saw growing were a Dwarf Palmetto and a white Verbena that had escaped whatever borders it once grew in. 

In Thibodaux, there was this gorgeous, very dark blue Agapanthus… maybe it’s ‘Elaine’?

Pretty much anything you put in a cemetery will eventually be covered in lichen and mold.

Of course, you know the most popular kind of flower in a cemetery?  Plastic.

Hey, you know why they have to put fences around cemeteries? 

‘Cause people are dying to get in.

           

Ol’ Crazy Beard

 “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.