We’re in the home stretch now. For the last 40 years, the worst of Dallas’s summer heat was worth tolerating for an autumn that seemingly goes on forever. Some Octobers are anomalies, with surprising rains and even the subfreezing temperatures of Halloween 1993. Most, though, follow the same path of “sunny, warm but not too warm, with clear nights and just a reminder that we might actually hit jacket weather by the middle of November.” For all its faults and nightmares, 2020 is shaping up to give us one of those perfect autumns.
The lack of killing heat isn’t only good for us humans. Right now is when temperate carnivorous plants such as Sarracenia pitcher plants and Venus flytraps get their best color and growth, mostly in preparation for their eventual dormancy starting in November. All through October, in the Dallas area at least, Sarracenia of all species grow their tallest and flashiest in efforts to gather as much spare nitrogen as they can before the cold sets in and insects disappear for the season. It’s all going away, eventually, but not right now.
This week, things go into overdrive to finish up the gallery renovation in preparation for a debut on October 17 (keep an eye out for announcements on particulars) and on getting new enclosures ready for that debut. (For anyone doing any kind of painting in Dallas right now, the weather is absolutely perfect: warm but not too warm, breezy but not too windy, and a relative humidity best described, like local tap water, as “crunchy.”) This doesn’t mean that the Sunday morning Porch Sale on October 11 isn’t going to happen: if anything, it’ll be a good break. See you then.