Monthly Archives: June 2012

Unorthodox but essential miniature garden reading

Over the past few months, several good friends announced impending gardening books or book deals, and it shouldn’t be any surprise that my friend Janit Calvo is working on one for Timber Press on miniature garden design. Not only do I wish her the best on this, but I’m buying a copy the moment it becomes available. In the meantime, what laughingly passes for spare time at the Triffid Ranch goes mostly to research, and I realized a little while back that I had one of the best guides to miniature garden design in my library, and that I’d bought it a quarter-century ago this summer.

You’re going to laugh.

Without realizing it, this book taught me everything I know about composition of miniature garden scenes. It taught me the difference between symmetry and balance, where balance is necessary for a proper composition but symmetry merely makes it look artificial and forced. It taught me to take advantage of what I already had, and to scratchbuild the items I needed to make a scene work. It taught me the basics on natural versus artificial lighting, proper scale, and making sure that the scene was neither too large or too small.

Oh, you’re definitely going to laugh.

Best of all, until a few years ago, there’s almost no chance that gardeners would have come across this book. It’s not that it’s rare or obscure, but that its enthusiasts usually don’t share notes with gardeners. A shame, really, because Janit’s push on miniature garden arrangement means that they’re going to start running into each other more often, and we’re going to have a ridiculous amount of fun when that happens.

How to Build Dioramas by Shepard Paine

To wit, the book in question is How To Build Dioramas by Sheperd Paine, subtitled “Your Complete How-To-Do-It Guide To Diorama Planning, Construction, and Detailing For All Types of Models”. Originally published in 1980, it was in its fourth printing by the time I discovered it in an MJDesigns north of Dallas in the summer of 1987. I already had a fascination with diorama design, but this one made me think about their design.

The reason why I recommend every last miniature gardener needs a copy of this book? Well, when you think about it, the only difference between a well-composed miniature garden and a well-composed diorama is that the latter can be put in a closet or on a shelf somewhere without worry about anything dying. Otherwise, the idea of both is to tell some type of story, or at least hint at one, with the materials at hand. With a diorama involving plastic model kits, the kit can be the centerpiece of the scene, or it can be a supporting character or situation, but it has to stay within context of the whole arrangement. With a miniature garden, the plants are absolutely essential, but they can also be centerpieces or supporting characters. In both case, put in too much, put in features that detract from each other, or otherwise remind viewers that they’re looking at a construct instead of a vignette, and they’re ruined.

How to Build Dioramas, 2nd Edition

In my case, I’m very fond of both the original edition and the 1999 second edition for different reasons. Not only is the second edition full of new material, but it goes into detail on utilizing resin-cast figures (as well as making them), and new materials for customization that simply weren’t available in the early Eighties. You might not think this is such a big deal, until you come across the nearly-perfect item for a miniature garden, but realize that it needs a new backing or just the right ornamentation to complete the effect. I’m not even going to start on how valuable knowing how to wire supplemental lighting can be, especially considering the options with LEDs and solar-charged batteries these days.

The biggest reason why I hang onto my copies of this book (heck, I won’t even let the Czarina borrow them, because the first edition has that much sentimental attachment for me) is because this was the book that really made me consider stories in miniature garden arrangement. Since we’re very visual creatures at heart, we instinctively block out the plants in arrangements unless they have especially intriguing foliage or flowers. When the subject is a particularly impressive plant or plant arrangement, and viewers are too busy focusing on the little animal or human figures placed therein, then You’re Doing It Wrong. Sheperd Paine understood that these have their place, but that they should always be helping the viewer recognize the real center of the display. Just as bonsai is much more than hacking a sapling or shrub into something approximating a miniature tree, miniature gardening is much more than plopping a few toys and miniatures among randomly selected plants in a terra-cotta bowl. Read through either edition, and just feel the garden ideas percolating through your head while doing so.

Building and Painting Model Dinosaurs by Ray Rimell

And while we’re on the subject, quite a few casual readers were taken by a recent discussion on incorporating dinosaur and other prehistoric animal figures into miniature gardens, and that’s why I also highly recommend Ray Rimell’s 1998 book Building and Painting Model Dinosaurs to anyone wanting to incorporate a few archosaurs or therapsids into their arrangements. Of particular note, Rimell starts off by noting the ease in modifying and customizing the often luridly-colored dinosaur figures currently available, and that should keep all of you busy for a while.

I’m planning to come back to this subject quite a bit more in the next few months, but let’s just say I suspect that we’re going to be seeing a lot more crossover between traditional gardening and traditional model-building as miniature gardening continues to increase in popularity. This, by the way, is why I’m now checking on what UV inhibitors work best with traditional resin and polystyrene composition, and why I’m planning to have a very long and hearty talk with a few resin kit designer friends. The field won’t know what hit it.

Have a Great Weekend

I have precious little patience for anime, but the music pretty much sums up the mood for the weekend.

Views from EagleQuest XXI

And here’s one for Janit Calvo at Two Green Thumbs Miniature Garden Center. While you might be excused to assume that a model show like EagleQuest is full of military, space, or dinosaur models and dioramas, there’s always something to surprise you. Witness this diorama recreation of a key scene from the film Amadeus:

Amadeus diorama

Amadeus diorama detail

Almost there with an explanation…

Views from EagleQuest XXI

Now, I’m no fan of either iteration of Battlestar Galactica, but this reconstruction of the battlestar Pegasus was a marvel. Fiber optics, a lit display base, and a binder containing the details on its construction and detailing. This was just one of the wonders at last weekend’s EagleQuest XXI.

Battlestar Pegasus

We’re nearly there…

Views from EagleQuest XXI

Still more photos from last weekend’s EagleQuest XXII model show, for those arriving late.

Turret

Turret

Turret

Turret

All will be revealed soon.

Views from EagleQuest XXI

Still more photos from last weekend’s EagleQuest XXI model show:

Tenontosaurus

Tenontosaurus closeup

Tenontosaurus extreme closeup

As mentioned previously, all will be explained soon. Incidentally, this beautiful model is of Tenontosaurus, a hypsilophodont dinosaur native to this area. In fact, trivia enthusiasts might note that a skeleton of Tenontosaurus put up in the Dallas Museum of Natural History in 1989 was the first Texas dinosaur ever put on display in a Texas museum. All others were either Texas dinosaurs in museums located elsewhere, or imported dinosaurs in our museums. This little guy (and at about 6 meters long in life, he really wasn’t all that little) is a bit of history.

Views from EagleQuest XXI

More photos from last weekend’s EagleQuest XXI model show:

Creature from the Black Lagoon

And by now, you really don’t care how this connects to gardening. Patience.

Views from EagleQuest XXI

More views from last weekend’s EagleQuest XXI model show:

LBJ Mech

LBJ Mech

LBJ Mech

And what does this have to do with gardening? Come back this weekend.

Views from EagleQuest XXI

Last week’s EagleQuest plastic modeler’s show, hosted by Squadron Models, inspired all sorts of ideas, as it was just loaded with beautifully constructed and detailed model kits of all sorts. Over the next few days, keep an eye open for more entries, because this show was just loaded.

Motorcycle

Model within a chiminea

And what does this have to do with gardening? Find out this weekend.

Leonhardt Lagoon at Dallas’s Fair Park

Leonhardt Lagoon at Fair Park

I’m regularly asked why I stay in Dallas, all by people who have never so much as visited. Yes, it’s hot during our seemingly never-ending summers. Yes, Highland Park produces people so plastic and artificial that they’re just waiting to declare war upon the Daleks. Yes, we’re not known as a haven for artists, writers, or musicians, or at least the work ethic-challenged wannabes waiting for their first million-dollar contract, no matter how hard some city leaders try to turn us into another Portland or Austin. Sometimes that’s the biggest appeal, though, because Dallas forces you to appreciate the little bits of beauty and protect them. Such is the case of the Leonhardt Lagoon in the middle of Fair Park, just south of downtown.

Lagoon sculpture

Lagoon sculpture

Lagoon sculpture

Lagoon sculpture

Lagoon sculpture

Lagoon sculpture

Lagoon lilypads

Leonhardt Lagoon

Lagoon sculpture

No, the previous photos aren’t left over from a celebration of the life of H.P. Lovecraft. The singular lagoon sculptures therein were created by Dallas artist Patricia Johanson, who wanted to renovate the lagoon with structures evocative of ferns and duck-potato. Not only are they open to the public (in fact, the park encourages people to climb onboard and view the indigenous plant and animal life close-up), but the portions not easily reached by humans are full of basking turtles on most sunny days.

Lagoon turtle

The vast majority of the turtles in the lagoon are the native red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans), which feed on insects, fish, carrion, and water plants. Get up high, though, and be surprised at the mud turtles (Kinosternon subrubrum) staying out toward the center. The real fun, though, comes in winter, where walking out onto the platforms might startle a still-active snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina) into ducking back under a platform.

Lagoon turtle

Rameses the Great commemorative stone

Not all of the wonders around the lagoon are natural. Half my life ago, Fair Park hosted the “Rameses the Great” exhibition of Rameses II artwork and artifacts, and the biggest trace was this commemorative stone left behind in 1989.

Rameses the Great commemorative stone

Jumbo

Likewise, the former Dallas Museum of Natural History building adds a bit to the lagoon’s feel. Back in 1986, construction in downtown uncovered the nearly complete remains of a Columbian mammoth, and volunteers restored and assembled the skeleton at the Museum. (Until the recent move to the new Perot Museum in downtown, that skeleton was one of the highlights of the Texas Giants Hall on the second floor of the old museum.) “Jumbo” is a bronze sculpture intended to give a life-sized view of how the mammoth appeared in life, perpetually overlooking the lagoon but not quite able to get over there for a drink.

Lagoon cypress

And since the main draw of the lagoon is the flora, it’s hard not to notice the bald cypress (Taxodium distichum var. distichum) growing along the banks. T. distichum is a native Texas tree, if not necessarily a native Dallas one: it’s usually found to the east and the south, where wetlands tend to stay wet in the summer. Thanks to the shape of the area, though, the lagoon has a humid microclimate that sustains and encourages the cypress, and it tends to grow much larger here than in most places in Dallas where it’s been introduced.

cypress cones

Cypress knees

The famed “knees” of bald cypress are more formally known as pneumatophores or aerial roots, which allow the roots to absorb oxygen in otherwise completely anaerobic conditions. These are also seen in mangroves and other mud-loving trees, but they’re not quite as impressive. The knees in the Lagoon’s cypresses range in size depending both upon their proximity to the lagoon and their proximity to the rest of the landscape: lawn mowers tend to keep them trimmed before they get too tall.

Cypress roots

Cypress knees

Cypress knees

Honey mesquite

Across from the bald cypresses, off Jumbo’s left shoulder, is this little garden space, featuring a real Dallas native. Mesquite is so common as a shrubby tree in the Dallas area, especially in overgrazed former cattle land, that even many natives don’t know how big it can get given half a chance. Most guides go on about the medicinal uses of mesquite, and you can’t talk about barbecue in Texas without someone talking about getting a cord of well-seasoned mesquite for the grille or smoker. Me, though, I just appreciate the big trees for what they are, and appreciate the shade they offer in the middle of summer.

Petrified log at the Lagoon

Finally, here’s a mystery right on the edge of the lagoon. As mentioned before, the whole of Fair Park was constructed as a World’s Fair exposition ground for the Texas state centennial in 1936, but a lot of history disappeared in the years after the city of Dallas took over the fairgrounds for the State Fair of Texas. Of particular note was this petrified log. Some stories relate that the north entrance to the fairgrounds featured an arch made of petrified wood, and this log has a concrete peg at one end that supports the idea (pun intended) of it being part of a larger monument. At the same time, though, nobody can find any definitive proof that any such structure existed. Yet the log exists, and it’s been sitting in that same space by the lagoon for the last quarter-century as proof. Anybody up for borrowing a time machine for a little while to take pictures of it in its old location? Or is it some silent sentinel from an unknown civilization in Texas’s distant past, just waiting for the right event to wake it up?

The Last Beer & Bones?

Museum of Nature & Science Lobby

I’ve touted the Beer & Bones events at the Museum of Nature & Science in Dallas’s Fair Park for a while, and last week’s “Space Cadets” B&B involving space science was one of the best yet. It was also a little bittersweet, too, as this was the last one to be held in the old Fair Park Museum of Fine Arts building. Starting next January, while the old buildings will remain (considering that they’re historical landmarks from the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition), most of the Museum’s activities are going to the new Perot Museum in downtown. In my case, I realized that I’ve been causing trouble at the Museum for half my life, back when this building was still The Science Place. Man, where has the time gone?

Museum of Nature & Science lobby

Crowd-wise, this was one of the most diverse as well. Any time you have a space-related event in Dallas, there’s at least one twerp who comes out in his Star Trek uniform (the best I can figure, someone’s still nostalgic for the Federation Science exhibition that ran there back in 1995), but the vast majority of attendees were there to learn something. Oh, and to meet other local science junkies: I suspect that about half of the attendees were high school and middle school teachers on vacation, and this was perfect for them.

Museum of Nature & Science lobby

As has been the case since the beginning of Beer & Bones, what really makes the event work is a combination of exemplary activities and events orchestrated by MNS staffers and the presentations made by outside volunteers. This time, the National Space Society of North Texas came out to display samples of simulated lunar soil, discuss upcoming robotic and manned space missions, and generally turn vaguely interested bystanders into space science enthusiasts. I’ve been an enthusiast since the Mariner missions of the Seventies, and they made me excited.

Museum of Nature & Science wall

Then again, that’s what the Museum has done best from the beginning. The old walls have plenty of stories: the robot dinosaur exhibitions, BodyWorlds, the long-running human body and hands-on physics demonstrations…this place has a lot of good memories associated with it.

Mercury

Finally, as I was leaving for the evening, a small mystery. The Museum terrazzo floors feature inlaid constellations and planets across the lobby, with the terrestrial planets right near the ticket counter. For instance, here’s Mercury…

Venus

…and Venus…

Mars

…and Mars. However, off to the right of Mars was this strange little body that I first thought might have been the asteroid Ceres or Vesta. Then I saw the name.

Cecil Green

Now, seeing as how the IMAX theater in the Museum is dedicated to the founders of Texas Instruments, this might be a reference to Cecil H. Green, the geophysicist who helped found TI. Of course, this being Dallas, it might also be a reference to Cecil Green the Dallas race car driver. Considering that “Cecil Green” appears to be a green and pastoral world, I also wouldn’t be surprised if it had been discovered and named after Canada’s one and only Time Lord. I’d ask for elaboration at the next Beer & Bones, but since there won’t be one at the old museum…

Revving up your sense of wonder

Unknown mantid

For various reasons, I thoroughly enjoy my day job. It’s not just because it pays for my various carnivorous plant fixes. It’s close enough to the house that I can bicycle to work without the trip being an ordeal. We’re located near enough Texas wilderness that I literally have no way to tell what I’ll encounter on the morning ride. I’ve passed bobcats, coyotes, Texas ratsnakes, red-tailed and Harris’s hawks, vultures and buzzards, armadillos, a bounty of songbirds ranging from scissortails to mockingbirds, at least three species of hummingbird, ox beetles, katydids, and even the occasional roadrunner. That’s not even counting the opossum curled up in a redbud tree right by the bike rack one morning two years ago, hoping that I hadn’t noticed 10 kilos of fatbutt in a tree far too small for it.

Another reason why I enjoy the Day Job comes from the daily conversations. I’m lucky enough to work with a crew of exceptional minds, and a lot of them have very different interests away from the job. When everyone stops in the morning, realizing that we’ve been staring at monitor screens for so long that the words start to run together, that’s when the real fun begins.

And so it happened last Friday, when my boss and I were discussing the upcoming Mars Curiosity rover landing in August. (His background is in fine arts, but he dabbles in quantum physics, and I’ve been a terrible influence on introducing him to the grand tradition of palaeontological art. As I said, it’s an interesting crew out here.) He looked over at a window, stopped for a second, and asked “What the hell is that bug?” Clinging to the window was what appeared at first to be a lacewing, but the more we viewed it, the stranger it was.

Firstly, as can be told, it’s definitely a mantis of some sort. However, with the four species generally found in the North Texas area, only nymphs are this small, and the wings confirm that this was an adult. (In the photo above, the little symbol is the recycling symbol on the bottom of a plastic bowl, left in to give a sense of scale.) The whole insect was only 1.5 centimeters long, with a shriveled abdomen that suggested that it was a female that had just laid its egg case. As it was, it was already dying when we found it, and it expired maybe an hour after its capture.

Taking a view of the corpse through a dissecting microscope just brought up more questions. I’ve seen similar grasping arms on other mantid species, but ones that got much, MUCH larger than this one. Only when cleaning up this photo did the second pair of wings present themselves, and with two pairs of wings being a diagnostic for all members of the order Mantodea, I was wondering at first if it were a mantis after all until I saw the second pair. At this size, I could see it being an aggressive predator of ants, aphids, and other small insects, but that’s a bit hard to test with a deceased specimen.

To make things even stranger, no mantid of this sort shows up in Texas bug references, which makes me wonder if it were one blown in via winds off the Gulf of Mexico last week. The big question now is “Is this a lost traveler who was extremely far from home when she died, or is this a representative of a new species that somehow slid past the determined and dedicated crew at the Texas A&M Department of Entomology?” More research is in order, because I’m hoping that this one wasn’t the last of her kind.

EDIT: With friends like Michael Cook, you’d think I’d have the brains to ask someone like him, who practically knows every member of the Phylum Arthropoda on a first-name basis, for a positive ID. It turns out our friend was a mantisfly, a rather rare group of insects more closely related to ant lions and lacewings than true mantids. Many thanks to Michael for passing on that information, and for widening my horizons that much more. I may never see another mantisfly again, but at least I can say that I’ve seen at least one.

Have A Great Weekend

Thursday is Resource Day

Believe it or not, today is a beautiful day for miniature garden discussions. It isn’t just that Janit Calvo at Two Green Thumbs Miniature Gardens keeps giving me all sorts of interesting ideas for projects. It isn’t just that the new issue of Reptiles and the new issue of Carnivorous Plant Newsletter arrived on the same day, and they always inspire. No, it’s because I promised Janit that I was going to get around to giving her a guide to several very unorthodox books that should be essential in any miniature gardener library, and I might be able to get that written up this weekend.

As a taste, though, I’d like to pass on word about an event this weekend that should be essential for any serious miniature gardener. Squadron, our friendly neighborhood mail-order plastic model kit supplier (quite literally, as its headquarters is right down Highway 190 from my house) hosts the regular model kit expo EagleQuest, and EagleQuest XXII (PDF) starts tomorrow and runs until Saturday evening at the Embassy Suites Dallas Hotel in Grapevine. I’ll explain later, but any serious miniature gardener NEEDS to be out here if necessary. The cross-pollination will do both miniature gardening and plastic kit modeling a world of good.

Likewise, here’s a tip for those needing miniature gardening tools. Micro-Mark, one of the best sources for modeling tools out there, is holding its annual summer sale, with lots of specials. Again, I’ll explain later, but I’ll leave you with one word: Milliput. If this stuff isn’t already your best friend for construction, repair, and modification, then let me introduce you and hope you have lots of babies.

And before I forget, the Museum of Nature & Science in Dallas’s Fair Park hosts its latest Beer & Bones adult museum event tonight, with the subject tonight being “Space Cadets”. This also ties into gardening in its way, because arriving early means getting a good view of the Leonhardt Lagoon and surrounding environs, which is just rotten with animal and plant life right now. I’ll explain exactly why this is so important later, so don’t worry about taking notes.

Absolute Surefire Steps To Kill Your Venus Flytrap, Step 8

Curious about the context? Check out the introduction.

Some of the content in this series appeared, in much shorter form, in Gothic Beauty magazine.

Step 8: Keep moving it around.

Most of the appeal of carnivorous plants is in their appropriation of traits normally associated with animals. That’s also their doom. Since some are more active, from a human perspective, than most plants, we tend to ascribe feelings and impressions to them better suited to pets than ikebana. One of the most dangerous of these impressions is the assumption that since carnivores catch and digest prey, they need to be fed on a schedule and regimen more suited for a dog than a pitcher plant. The other, equally dangerous, is that they need to get out for a while.

By way of example, a friend of mine purchased a butterwort from me last year. He keeps a wide variety of reptiles, so he had a good grasp of the basic requirements for keeping a butterwort happy and healthy: good water, decent air circulation, and lots and lots of light. He went for a couple of months without any problems, and then he contacted me in a panic. His butterwort was collapsing in on itself, and when I tried to diagnose the trouble, he told me “I put it outside for a little while, so it could get some air.” In the middle of last summer’s heat wave.

Another example came from another good friend, who was very proud of her new Venus flytrap. Flytraps require lots of sun, high humidity, and good air circulation, of which you can get two out of those three during the summer. I combat this by raising flytraps outdoors in large glass globes: excess heat vents out the top, but humidity loss is kept to a relative minimum, and the flytraps just explode with new growth when given this option. Her flytrap was doing remarkably well for a while, and then she wrote me to ask about its health. It went into a sudden decline a couple of weeks ago, about the time the temperatures started to spike, and she couldn’t figure out why. I couldn’t, either, until she said that the problem came one day after she brought the plant “back inside” from where it had been during the day.

This is where the impression of carnivorous plants as animals with chlorophyll is dangerous to them. While protecting them from temperature and humidity extremes is recommended, most animals kept as pets have no problems with being moved around a bit for a change of scenery and some fresh air. The problem here is that the vast majority of animals get up and move when temperatures and other conditions fluctuate past “nominal”. Plants can’t do that, or at least they can’t do it quickly, and carnivorous plants are still just that: plants.

Part of the reason why we humans blank out on most of the incredible variety and diversity of flora around us is because it doesn’t move. We’re conditioned, from millions of years of evolutionary development, to seek out the lone animal in a panorama of green. Show a portraiture of prehistoric life, and the emphasis is always on the animals. If any plants show up, they’re purely background unless an animal is eating or climbing one. Carnivorous plants subvert that by their nature, so we tend to home in on the features of carnivores that look the most animal-like, such as the “mouths” of pitcher plants and Venus flytraps. (This also helps explain the odd connection in fiction between dinosaurs and man-eating plants, but that’s the subject of another essay.)

The danger here is that while carnivores may act like animals in some ways, they’re still vegetation. Nobody (or at least nobody sane) digs up a rose bush and carries it around with them in a gilt pot all day. Plants can move in any number of fascinating ways, but with the exception of floating varieties such as the aquatic ferns of the genus Azolla, they’re ultimately limited to the place where their roots first went down. Most plants generally move across the countryside either when they’re dead (tumbleweeds scattering their seeds) or in serious trouble (aloes trying to escape poor conditions by snapping free of their stems and rolling to new locales). They just don’t have the energy to move far on their own, and so they don’t have the adaptations animals have to deal with the changing conditions faced even ten feet away from where they were growing previously. They can deal with changes, but on a gradual basis, and moving your flytrap back and forth happens too quickly for it to adjust.

To give you an idea of how a low-energy organism like a plant adapts to this, imagine you’re at home, sitting on the couch. You’re in comfortable clothes, you have a cold drink in your hand, Spaced is on the television, and all is right in the world. You’re just getting into things when something moving too fast for you to see or even acknowledge picks you up and dumps you into a cold mud puddle out in front of the house. You’ve just had the chance to spit out water and wonder “What the hell just happened?” when you find yourself back on the couch. And then you’re tossed into the refrigerator. And then under an air conditioner vent. And then next to the oven. Then you’re thrown out into the sun, sans sunscreen or sunglasses. Just as you’re starting to burn, you’re dumped in a closet for a few hours with no food. Then you’re put out back in the sun, in the middle of a sunny July day in Phoenix. And then you’re put next to a swimming pool. And this goes on for days.

Now, you can move to adjust, but whatever is moving you is moving too fast for you to do anything. Reach for an available cup of water, and you’re swung out of range. Reach out for a blanket to deal with the chills, and suddenly your arm is snipped off with no warning. Ultimately, the stress of dealing with all of this is going to make you sick or depressed or both, and you’re going to run out of energy to fight the constant changes. If you’re lucky, that something will take pity on you and leave you alone until you get rid of the cold you got from being bounced in and out of air conditioning. If you’re not…well, you might be remembered fondly as you’re tossed into the garbage after you finally let loose one last scream before dying. That, in essence, is what you do to any plant if you move it around and transplant it constantly.

To be clear, I’m not saying that you should never move plants from adverse conditions. What I am saying is that you need to give them time to adjust. Just as how keeping you indoors under AC all summer and then expecting you to run a 100-mile bicycle race with no training and no opportunity to acclimate to the heat will probably kill you, swinging a plant back and forth between extremes will do the same thing. When you buy a flytrap and bring it home, pick a good spot for it to grow and leave it there. If you have to move it, do so only because the current space is an immediate threat to its health and continuing existence, and try to make the change as gradual as possible. You don’t want the Tralfamadorians to load up on sugar, go into full Cornholio mode, and toss you into a snowbank for a few hours, do you? Then why would you want to do the same thing to your flytrap?

Put A Stamp On It

Texas Triffid Ranch package

In the Northern Hemisphere, we officially cross over from spring to summer today. This means it’s time to share comments about the weather with friends living further north. It means that I’m now running out of suggestions for friends at the Day Job as to what their kids can do on summer vacation that won’t cost a fortune. (I’m afraid “how about getting them jobs in a coal mine and telling them ‘it’s steampunk’?” doesn’t go over all that well, but that’s only because the nearest mines are in Tennessee.) Best of all, it means that it’s time to make the world’s postal carriers HATE me. It’s time for freebies.

Here’s the situation. It started when I was organizing my office. (Let’s be honest. “Organizing my office” is much like giving a corpse an enema because “it couldn’t hurt.” The place looks as if Hunter S. Thompson camped out there for a month. Let me say “I was attempting to prevent an avalanche of old papers threatening to smash down the wall and entomb my neighbor in 20-year-old correspondence.”) While wondering if I had enough cord to connect the detonator to the primary charges, I came across a cardboard box left over from a promotional campaign three years ago. Inside that box…

Well, inside the box was treasure for the right people. And it can be yours, should you be so inclined.

Inside the box were 70 individual envelopes, labeled with return addresses and filled with goodies. Specifically, each one contains a Triffid Ranch sticker, a Triffid Ranch button, and other random items. All you need to do to get one is ask. The first 70 people to send a mailing address gets an envelope in return.

Because everyone looks side-eyed whenever I offer free items, here are the rules:

Numero Uno: One envelope will be sent per address. This may be home, work, mail drop, or slot in the side of a tree. However, if you know of people who’d enjoy getting something for free this summer, include their addresses as well.

Numero Two-O: This offer is open to the citizens of the planet Earth, no matter where you’re located. All I need is a valid mailing address, and the postage costs will be covered by the Texas Triffid Ranch.

Numero Three-O: To belay any concerns about privacy, any addresses gathered will only be used for the purpose of sending envelopes, and will NOT be used in any other way. They also will NOT be given to anybody else, for any reason whatsoever.

Numero Four-O: All requests for envelopes must be submitted by midnight on June 30, 2012. This offer will continue until then or until all envelopes are claimed, whichever comes first.

Numero Five-O: Should you wish to share details of this offer with others, please feel free. Again, the offer continues until all envelopes are claimed.

And if all of that made sense, send in a request with your Snail Mail address to buttons@txtriffidranch.com, and I’ll finish it from there. I thank you, the Czarina thanks you, and my next-door neighbor thanks you.

Tales From The Ranch: Introducing Opuntia engelmannii var. lindheimeri

Anyone care to venture as to what this might be?

Opuntia pad skeleton

Okay, that’s a little lacking in context. How about this?

Opuntia skeleton detail

That’s not really fair. How about seeing a few of these with the flesh intact?

Old Opuntia

My in-laws’ ranch contains at least five distinct species of cactus, and the vast majority of it is the common prickly pear, in one form of Opuntia engelmannii or another. Out of those variations, Opuntia engelmannii var. lindheimeri is the most common. As with other cacti, O. englemannii protects itself with spines. Unlike all other cacti, Opuntia cacti also bear specialized hairlike spines called glochids, which catch in the skin and break off.

(Some of you may be familiar with the story of Commander Nishino Kozo, who led the first Japanese attack on the US mainland during World War II. The popular account of the shelling of the Ellwood oil fields near Santa Barbara was due to Nishino’s first visit to the area while a freighter captain: he fell into a prickly pear cactus and was so humiliated by oil rig workers laughing at him over it that he swore revenge. Having done the same thing, and having to wait for the glochids to fall out, a very long and uncomfortable process, we should be glad that Commander Nishino didn’t go a lot further.)

Sadly, by the end of May, the gorgeous yellow blooms on O. englemannii are already long-gone, and the fruit won’t turn purple when ripe until about the beginning of October. In the meantime, May is a good time to examine the growing fruit. An average prickly pear can carry anywhere between one to 25 of these fruit, depending upon the prior season. Last year, for instance, the drought caused most of the prickly pear to drop their fruit early, leading to a corresponding lack of autumn food for cattle, deer, birds, coyotes, raccoons, and pigs. This spring, though, the rains were both abundant and frequent, so expect a bumper crop of “tuna” come Halloween.

Opuntia fruit

In the interim, because growing conditions are so amenable, the prickly pear take advantage of late spring to do most of their growing. The young pads give hints of their relations to other flowering plants, at least until the fleshy spikes turn into standard and glochid spines.

Opuntia growing a new pad
As far as growing Opuntia is concerned, the trick isn’t trying to keep it alive. It’s trying to kill it off. Prickly pears are notoriously forgiving in their growing conditions, only needing very good drainage and no chance of sitting in overly moist ground for more than a few days. Because the pads are mostly water (the pads are technically edible if peeled and cooked, with a consistency somewhere between cantaloupe and raw squash and a flavor best described as “acquired taste”), prickly pear can’t handle long periods of sub-freezing weather, so they need to be protected if grown in areas with significant amounts of snow and ice. Other than that, though, they’re nearly unstoppable. As Australians learned to their peril when prickly pear was introduced to the continent, if the cactus is burned or chopped down, it resprouts from the roots. If a single pad is left behind, no matter seemingly how mangled, it can and will root and grow into a whole new bush before too long. Worst of all, each prickly pear fruit is full of incredibly tough seeds, and they can and will sprout just about anywhere they land. When birds eat the fruit, seeds and all, those little chunks of aquarium gravel can end up sprouting in cliff faces, atop sandy washes, and even in places you wouldn’t expect.

Opuntia in a dead tree

Yes, that’s an O. englemannii growing in a tree. It’s been there for at least thirty years, and considering the slow rate of decay of most wood on the ranch, it may be there for another twenty before the stump finally snaps and throws it to the ground. After that, it’ll probably scatter pads and form a whole new clump. So far, that cactus has survived two major droughts, although last year’s drought almost got it, along with cattle nibblings, several bad blizzards, and the occasional overly enthusiastic deer hunter. At the rate it’s going, it’ll probably outlive all of us.

Future Triffid Ranch projects

When I’m not making plans to offer fast food to the Harris hawk, it’s time to get ready for the next big Triffid Ranch show: FenCon this September. With that comes the advantage of doing live shows over mail order. Namely. being able to bypass the insanity of the US Post Office. Yes, Triffid Ranch Nepenthes may be a little more expensive than ones ordered from another nursery. However, they’re also going to be much larger than is practical or sane to ship, especially in the summer, and they’re going to come with pots that will damage your fragile little mind.

Figurine Front

For instance, check out this puppy, recently snagged at an estate sale. Deliberately fake Maya and Olmec pots of this sort were standard tourist fare throughout the Sixties and Seventies, and there was a time circa 1981 where it seemed nearly impossible to find a house in North Texas that didn’t have an authentic fake figure pot from Texcoco in it. Maybe I remembered it differently, but they seemed to be as common in Texas houses as anniversary clocks further north, and in the same spot of honor atop the monster console television in the living room. Then, with no warning, they all disappeared from the land, without so much as a sighting or two in garage sales to mark the passing of a long-running fad.

Figurine Side

I’ll state from the beginning that I’m a sucker for well-done fabricated artifacts, so long as I know from the beginning that it’s a modern fabrication, and this one has its merits. As can be noticed from the photos, though, this figure was damaged a few times before it ended up in the estate sale. The front cup, which is the perfect size for a succulent such as a Stapelia, was cracked at least twice in its life. The first time, the part was glued back in. The second time, a big chip came off and was lost. In order to be usable again, it needs restoration. And herein lies the dilemma.

Over the past few years, I’ve noted a decided change in the presentation of restored archaeological and palaeontological treasures. Until the late Eighties, the idea was to make the restoration match the new material as much as possible, to the point where telling bone from plaster was nearly impossible without X-rays. Now, though, I’m seeing a trend toward making sure the general public understands how much of a piece was reconstructed after discovery, with obvious white or grey patches to fill in for missing material. Since I’m also a sucker for modern museum displays, do I patch the spot so that nobody can tell where clay ends and Milliput begins, or does this repair beg to make the final piece look as if it were “borrowed” from a friendly museum prior to its appearance in a plant show? Questions, questions.

Introducing Anolis carolinensis

Last weekend was a time to get busy at the Triffid Ranch. We haven’t truly moved into traditional Texas summer weather yet, and man, beast, and plant understood this, because we were all going a bit nuts. I spent Saturday and Sunday making a new raised bed edge for the Czarina’s tomato garden, pruning and trimming various bushes on the property, clearing clover out of the Sarracenia pots, clearing clover seeded from the Sarracenia pots out of the horsecrippler cactus, repotting Bhut Jolokia and Trinidad Scorpion peppers for the next big show in September, deadheading orchids, and watering the flytraps. By Saturday evening, by the time the Czarina got home, my usual lament about not having access to the 57-hour day was coming off my lips with the raging froth at the clover. At least I didn’t have to deal with the squirrels digging up the Sarracenia, at least since a big female Harris’s hawk started using the rooftop as a dining room table and my greenhouse as a commode. (With the hawk, the only beef is with bluejay feathers blowing off the roof. Other than that, “Shayera Hol” is welcome here for as long as she wants to stay. I don’t even mind her sitting on the greenhouse, staring at the cats through the window.)

Around the Triffid Ranch, taking the time to smell the roses was secondary to taking the time to watch the critters, and it was a day for critter-watching. Moving a brick in the tomato bed dislodged a rough earth snake (Virginia striatula), a snake so sweet-tempered and inoffensive that even serious ophidiophobes tend to soften a bit upon seeing one. Lots of Mediterranean geckos (Hemidactylus turcicus)hid among the bricks as well, waiting for nightfall. And then, as I was moving a batch of dragonfruit cactus pots, this little gentleman moved just enough to let me know he was there.

Sunbathing Carolina anole

The first common misconception about the Carolina anole (Anolis carolinensis) is that, because of its common nickname “American chameleon,” it can change color with the range and definition of Old World chameleons. While A. carolinensis can switch between various shades of green and brown, it has nothing on true chameleons. However, true chameleons don’t have the brilliant scarlet dewlap, which looks as if the lizard were brushed with powdered rubies, that male anoles flash to signal territorial claims. This fellow wasn’t worried about other anoles trying to take his space, but he also wasn’t taking an eye off me.

Carolina anole closeup

The other assumption about Carolina anoles, at least in North Texas, is that they’re escapees from captivity that went feral. Although a lot of anoles may have been released in the wild in the Dallas area from the days when they were inexplicably popular offerings in pet shops, this is actually native habitat for A. carolinensis, and they range south to the Gulf of Mexico and north into Arkansas before moving east all the way to the Atlantic. They don’t get as large in Dallas as they do in Tallahassee, but considering some of the gigantic anoles (not to be mistaken for the introduced Cuban anoles in the area) I used to catch in Tally, I’m actually a bit happy. This one was about as long as my hand, which suggested that he was getting both plenty of insects and plenty of drinking water. Anoles will not drink still water, and prefer to drink dew from plants, so I suspect the mister system in the greenhouse may have made his life a bit easier last summer.

"I'm ready for my closeup now, Mr. deMille."

When I was a kid in Michigan, I dreamed of one day keeping an anole as a pet, and would camp out at the pet sections in department stores to stare at the lizards. I know today that the vast majority didn’t survive more than a few weeks of that treatment, and many more died due to substandard care with their future owners, but lizards were a rarity up there and color-changing ones nonexistent. I became enough of an insufferable know-it-all on the subject that when showing my little brother a cage full of them at a K-Mart, I related “Look: Carolina anoles.” This peeved the toad overseeing the pet section, and he proceeded to correct me: “They’re chameleons.”

“No, they’re anoles. Anolis carolinensis. They’re native to the East Coast.”

He pulled out a cheap booklet entitled “All About Chameleons” from a shelf, and promptly showed me pictures of anoles, and then flashed the cover again, emphasizing the word “chameleon.” I then asked if I could see the book, and promptly read to him the first several paragraphs about anole habits and scientific nomenclature. He grabbed the book back, sneered “You’re just making it up,” told us to get out before he called the head manager, and went back to the dreams of a K-Mart pet shop manager. Probably involving how, when someone finally gave him command of a Constitution-class starship, he’d get into pissing matches with seven-year-olds and win.

Well, that was then. Now, I figure the lizards are happier and healthier in the yard than they’d ever be in captivity, and I encourage moonflowers (Ipomoea alba) and trumpet vine (Campsis radicans) to give the anoles and geckos more cover. This fellow sat atop that fence top with a very catlike demeanor, and when he was done watching me, he skittered off to do whatever anoles do in their off time. He’s always welcome to come back, and bring his harem with him, too.

Tales From The Ranch: Introducing Opuntia leptocaulis

For most people living outside the US, and for many inside the US, the word “cactus” brings up two images. The obvious first one is of a saguaro (Carnegiea gigantea), even though the saguaro is (a) one of the most extreme in size of all cacti, and (b) restricted to only a small area of southwest North America. (I’m still amazed at how often saguaro imagery shows up in cowboy motifs in Texas, even though the nearest one in the wild is in Arizona. It’s that iconic.) The second is of some sort of prickly pear (Opuntia spp.), which is a little more reasonable. Prickly pear not only thrives in desert and semi-desert, but just about any place with sufficient drainage for its roots and protection from long freezes. In fact, most people are surprised to find them thriving in the mangrove swamps of the Ten Thousand Islands in Florida.

Once those cliches are out of the way, Texas cacti have a lot of charms on their own. The best cactus-viewing in the state can be done around Big Bend National Park, and I heartily recommend such trips in mid-March, when the cacti and associated succulents are in full bloom. In the Dallas area, most cacti are limited to collections and the occasional prickly pear in an especially viable area (the seeds are spread by birds, so lone prickly pears can be found hundreds of miles away from their nearest neighbors), but go a little west of Fort Worth, and both cacti and agaves become significant components of the local flora.

Opuntia leptocaulis

Out on the west side of the Brazos River, for instance, it behooves visitors to be careful underneath scrub trees such as mesquite. This is preferred habitat for Opuntia leptocaulis, locally known as “pencil cactus,” among the names that can be printed. The Czarina’s family refers to it as “break-stick cactus,” from its habit to break off in chunks on skin, hair, and clothing, and it can be a menace in places where it grows alongside roads, trails, and paths.

O. leptocaulis detail

As can be told from its habits, O. leptocaulis isn’t especially fussy about its soil requirements, but it needs shade when smaller. Like all flowering plants, it reproduces by seed, and produces bright red fruits in the late fall that often remain on the plant through the winter. Like its prickly pear cousins, it also reproduces from pieces caught on animals and dropped elsewhere, causing it to be compared to the famed chollas of the Joshua Tree National Park of California. This helps explain why O. leptocaulis ranges all the way from the Brazos to the east all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

O. leptocaulis overview

O. leptocaulis blooms

One of the interesting aspects on O. leptocaulis is that it is one of the only cacti on the ranch that blooms in the evening to night, instead of blooming in the early morning as with the other species in the area. Between this habit, the size of the blooms, and the understandable concern more about the spines than the blooms, most people are surprised to see one blooming. They also tend to bloom much later in the year, around late May into June, when most of the more spectacular cactus blooms are long-gone and those cacti are more focused on producing fruit. That said, they gravitate toward insect pollinators, based mostly on their extreme luminance under UV illumination, but they apparently also offer a few drinks to hummingbirds as well.

O. leptocaulis fruit

Now, what few guides contain information on O. leptocaulis mention that the fruit are eaten by deer and other mammals, but you’d never know it based on the huge loads of fruit on mature plants. Prickly pears are eaten with gusto by everything from cattle to skunks. Horsecrippler fruit is preferred by birds, native peccary, and feral pigs, while the other indigenous barrel cactus save their attentions for small birds and possibly the occasional lizard or box turtle. In the last decade since first coming out to the ranch, though, I have yet to see any vertebrate touch a pencil cactus fruit. The invertebrates seem to enjoy them, though, as the cactus offers both hotel and cafeteria for various species of grasshopper and katydid. As to how they encourage seed spread, your guess is as good as mine, and this entails more trips to the ranch to investigate. Oh, the absolute agony.

Grasshopper in O. leptocaulis

Have a Great Weekend

Shoutouts for Friends

As the news feeds keep noting, the Dallas area got a bit of a hail pounding last night. No, that’s not some kind of weird Texas euphemism. A fair portion of the city took significant damage from hail ranging up to baseball-sized, with the worst damage just to the south of the Triffid Ranch. Specifically, the Lakewood area of East Dallas apparently had the most spectacular hailfall: the video feed making the rounds on CNN this morning showed a corner literally a block away from where my ex-wife and I lived in the mid-Nineties. Over here, we didn’t get so much as a sprinkling of rain, but a couple of miles south…oh, it was ugly.

Since I haven’t been in the area, I don’t know how many friends and cohorts are in trouble, but I now know for a fact that the Dallas branch of Redenta’s garden center was blasted as well. As of today, they’re hosting a 75-percent-off sale on hail-damaged plants, and I only wish I could get down there myself. Head down there right now, and please let them know I’m thinking of them.

In much happier news, I’m always glad to make a joyous noise on behalf of fellow carnivorous plant ranchers, and it’s time to note that Sarracenia Northwest, just outside of Portland, Oregon, holds its next Customer Appreciation Weekend on July 14 and 15. Yes, I’m saying this is worth a road trip. Yes, I’m saying this is worth getting a plane ticket for the visit. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’d move back to Portland just to be closer to the nursery, but I’m awfully tempted.

And in peripheral news returning to Dallas, last February’s show at ConDFW benefited both from exceptional weather for February (and the automatic response of everyone who lived through the February ice storms of 2011 is always suffixed with the phrase “Dig deeper, Watson”) and a very professional and organized dealer’s room crew. I was already tentatively planning a Triffid Ranch show at next year’s show, but discovering that the convention staff plans a major announcement on the new hotel venue? That sinks it. Get your tickets as soon as they’re available, and I hope to have a very singular collection of Nepenthes ready in time for the show next spring. (For those out-of-towners whose impressions of Dallas are based on the television series, February is spring out here, most years. Besides, you shouldn’t be watching the new Dallas TV show anyway. It was a lot better, and a lot more accurate concerning the University Park/Highland Park/Uptown areas, when it was still called The Walking Dead.)

Better Than Brawndo

Now, I’m sharing a rather intriguing paper in the Annals of Botany on digestive mutualism between several species of bromeliad and the bromeliad-living spider Psecas chapoda for several reasons. It’s not just because P. chapoda is just one of several species of spider adapted to living within bromeliads, with their feces and food scraps contributing toward the bromeliad’s nitrogen needs. It’s not just because further investigation may help develop new insights into why carnivory developed in so many flowering plants, as well as how the carnivorous bromeliad genera Brocchinia and Catopsis got their starts. It’s not just that this sort of digestive mutualism exists in many protocarnivorous and carnivorous-by-proxy plants, such as the South African genus Roridula. It’s not even because with enough true carnivorous plants that take advantage of assistance from animal predigestion of prey, such as frogs in Sarracenia, Nepenthes, and Heliamphora pitcher plants, this discovery may suggest that other plants are only protocarnivorous during the times of year when the spiders move in. On a personal note, it means I need to do more to encourage the indigenous jumping spiders in the area to move in among my Nepenthes and Catopsis.

No, the real reason I want to share is because in the course of a long and eventful life, I have a lot of very sick and sordid friends. In fact, I can see at least one of them making up a tiny outhouse for the pitcher of my Catopsis, or at least a little sign reading “Flush Twice: It’s A Long Way To The School Cafeteria”. I expect at least one to go electronic, and fit the Nepenthes racks with a motion sensor and a sound chip that chirps “DUDE! Light a match, will you?” I may be 45 going on 12, but my friends are even worse.

Tales From The Ranch: Introducing Megaphasma denticrus

I may have lived in Texas for nearly a third of a century, and definitely two-thirds of my life, but I’m constantly surprised. In fact, I think that’s what keeps bringing me back after I move elsewhere: well, that and the general state of the tech industry. Not everything is bigger in Texas, but the bugs…nobody’s going to argue that.

By way of example, while tromping through the Brazos River valley, the Czarina’s brother stops for a moment and comments idly “Hey, look. A walking stick.” Naturally, I assumed that he was talking about walking stick insects, members of the insect order Phasmida: I was familiar with them, but hadn’t seen one in years. The Czarina felt the same way, and she chirped about how she hadn’t seen any on the ranch since she was a little girl. That’s when she picked up a branch and brandished this monster.

Megaphasma denticrus

This, friends, is Megaphasma denticrus, generally held as the longest insect in North America. Ol’ Truzenzuzex here may not hold the record, but he’s definitely big enough, particularly for the phobic. Give the Czarina a few days, though, and she’d probably make a brace, bit, and saddle out of silver wire and bits of felt.

Megaphasma denticrus

Megaphasma denticrus

Megaphasma denticrus

From what the Czarina and her family informed me, the ranch had quite the population of these walking sticks in the early Seventies, and then they simply disappeared. One suspicion was the use of pesticides on local farmland that may have culled them back, or just simply that our ridiculously mild winter gave them an added impetus to emerge and spread. All I could tell you for sure was that we found them all over the place, and this was the first time in a decade I’d seen any at all. They were getting even bigger: we came back to the ranch house to find Truzenzuzex’s girlfriend N’Grath waiting for us.

Megaphasma denticrus

Boy, it’s a good thing that I like most insects. I don’t want to look for a rolled-up magazine or newspaper big enough to handle this beast.

Robert E Howard Days, Addenda

Well, so much for Cross Plains.I was greeted this morning with what was for him a nearly frantic phone call from Paul Mears: the love of his life was hit with a humdinger of a migraine, probably stirred up by the truly heroic amounts of pollen and fungus thrown up into the atmosphere by our recent rains. Having myself been slammed in the skull with Thor’s hammer myself in years past, only an idiot or a Cat Piss Man (but perhaps I repeat myself) would complain about having to cancel out on our trip to Cross Plains.

Well, there’s always next year. Like his old friend H.P. Lovecraft, I don’t think Bob Howard will be too offended if I have to skip out on his party again this year.

Tales From The Ranch

Meanwhile, back at “Tales From The Ranch,” one of the more relaxing locales at my in-laws’ ranch is The Quarry. This actually was a limestone quarry in the 1970s, because of its extensive deposit of dense and strong Pennsylvanian limestone. Now, it alternates between being a cattle tank and an appreciated watersource for the indigenous fauna. Coyotes, rabbits, deer, the occasional pronghorn antelope, and the even more occasional bobcat or mountain lion…you won’t see them around it, but you’ll definitely find their tracks and their scat.

The Ranch Quarry

Quarry Wall 1

Quarry Wall 2

Quarry Wall 3

Quarry Wall 4

Quarry Wall 5

I know what you’re thinking. “What’s up with all that cactus so close to the water?” Welcome to the never-ending dichotomy that is Texas.

Have a Great Weekend

Robert E. Howard Days in Cross Plains

Last year, my best friend Paul Mears and I did something that we’d been planning since we were freshmen in high school. Namely, we made a road trip across Texas to Cross Plains, in order to crash the Robert E. Howard Days celebration. For those unfamiliar with “Two-Gun Bob,” he was an extremely prolific pulp magazine writer of the 1930s: in many ways, he, H.P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith completely changed the face of American literature, particularly fantastic literature, through their mutual association via the magazine Weird Tales. In fact, a few of you may have seen a little movie called The Whole Wide World starring Vincent D’Onofrio and Renee Zellweger from about fifteen years ago:

Last year, the occasion was a bit somber, as the Saturday we arrived was the 75th anniversary of Howard’s suicide. That didn’t stop fans and enthusiasts from coming to the Robert E. Howard Museum from all over the planet.
Robert E. Howard Museum in Cross Plains

What’s funny is that while I was the person who introduced Mears to Howard’s work, he rapidly exceeded me in reading just about everything Howard ever wrote. In particular, he wanted to emulate a famous photo of Howard enjoying the loosening of Prohibition:

The best promo photo for Schlitz ever taken

The best promo photo for Aquafina ever taken

This is funny to me, of course, because Mears much more closely resembles a young H.P. Lovecraft.

As mentioned previously, this is a bit of an event for Howard enthusiasts, so we’re also going to hang out with friends. Well, when I say “hang out with friends,” what I really mean is “say hello to Mark Finn.” When I say “say hello to Mark Finn,” what I really mean is “make him regret bitterly not killing me when he had the chance.” Mark and I have been friends and fellow troublemakers for working on twenty years, and he’s blessedly one of the few writer friends from the old days who doesn’t nuhdz me about coming back to writing about science fiction. Part of that is because he secretly enjoys my gardening tirades whenever we get together, and part of that is because he knows and understands that my old science fiction writing sucked the farts from dead cats until their heads caved in. Either way, it’s a good reason to hang out with him, as he’s coming out with a big pile of copies of his book Blood and Thunder, and I’ve been requested by several Day Job friends to snag autographed copies. After that, we’re going to talk about local zoology and botany for a while, because I have an idea for a container garden project that absolutely needs his assistance.

Naturally, this won’t be just about pulp magazine nostalgia and a remembrance of a life cut far too short. This time last year, Cross Plains was at the beginning of a drought that exceeded that in North Texas, and the last time the area was hit so badly was when Howard was still alive. The rains returned this year, though, so I’m looking forward to getting photos of the Edwards Plateau flora. Among many others, I hope to get an identification of this bush on the REH Museum property, seeing as how everyone had left for the day by the time I saw it.
Mystery flower
As can be seen, much like the rest of Cross Plains, there’s a lot of beauty, so long as you can get out of the blasting sun to appreciate it.
Mystery flower

Anyway, Robert Howard Days runs this Friday and Saturday, so we’ll see you out there if you’re there and lament not being able to torment you mercilessly if you aren’t. See you then.

Thursday is Resource Day

Now here’s a brain-breaker for you: studying how the production of cocaine is different from that of its chemical cousin atropine, in order to show how tropane alkaloid production differs among the plant families that produce them. In related news, Southern Methodist University just announced the formation of its new horticulture department, answering directly to its business and journalism schools.

The joys of Texas meteorology

While nowhere near as bad as last summer, 2012’s weather continues its usual game of “Let’s Mess With Everyone’s Heads” in North Texas. Back in April, it was tornadoes and torrential rain, and then jack squat for a month. In our immediate area, we have a nearly incessant southerly wind that allegedly contains moisture coming up from the Gulf of Mexico. By the time it passes over San Antonio and Austin, it’s pretty much relieved of that excess. By the time it hits Waco, it’s empty. By the time it reaches Garland, the air is so dry that it could kill a silk ficus. Considering that the main focus of the Triffid Ranch is involved with raising and selling carnivores, which prefer high humidity, this little fact instigates a lot of oddball engineering.

To wit, the period between our tornado convention in April and today’s light rains was mostly dryer than Stephen Fry’s sense of humor. This naturally interfered with the laudable and reasonable intention of growing Sarracenia pitcher plants outdoors. Oh, they’d grow, but only a little, and they obviously fought between basic maintenance and growing enough traps to sustain themselves over the summer. By the beginning of May, the struggle became intense enough that I only had a few Sarracenia for Texas Frightmare Weekend that were a sellable quality. At that point, I realized that I needed to get a greenhouse, or at least some sort of wind shelter, for the Sarracenia. It was either that or moving to Galveston.

That’s when the Czarina chimed in. “You know,” she said, “the Harbor FreightTools is selling greenhouses for $300.”

I winced a little. Yes, it would get the job done for one small area, but I had plans for something just a smidgen larger. “Yeah, but I’d rather put in the money for a real one.”

She insisted. It wasn’t a bad deal as something to get me and the plants through the summer, until we could build a more permanent installation in the fall. Besides, she noted, she’d get it for me as an early birthday present. I relented, fearing her ever-sharp elbows if I kept arguing it, and we picked one up on sale. (I might note that because of confusion, I still ended up buying it myself, so this doesn’t qualify as a birthday present. This means that I get to torment her for the next three months by pricing crocodile monitor hatchlings and reminding her that she forced me to this situation. One day, she’ll actually agree to my getting a crocodile monitor, and then I’ll be stuck.)

Oh, let me tell you, putting together a kit greenhouse with only an hour or so available each day is entertaining. The instructions were complete enough, but sufficiently terse that I found myself repeatedly mumbling “If the Sontarans don’t find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.” It’s doing so while working in the worst sort of twilight, as mosquitoes large enough to have in-air refueling ports tried to steal the tools out of my hands. As things got darker, the Mediterranean geckos and more unrecognizable things came out to watch, and I’m not sure if they looked at me as sustenance or a source of mirth. I’m pretty sure I heard gecko laughter at least twice as I was trying to find locking bolts that had fallen into the grass. I know the little vermin were snickering when the Czarina came out to assist with putting up the last braces.

And then there was the plan for the glazing. The idea was to use the greenhouse frame as a framework atop the old Sarracenia growing area, and extend it about eight feet or so due north with greenhouse film. Fair and good, but installing greenhouse film requires both good weather and good light, and those days that had the light also had winds threatening to blow me, the greenhouse, and the rest of the neighborhood to Oz. A couple of gusts would have overshot Oz and gone straight for Lankhmar. By this last weekend, the framework had glazing along the base, and I figured “Oh, I’ll put in the top next week. Besides, if it rains, the Sarracenia can catch the rain so I don’t have to water.”

And talk about dodging a bullet. Yesterday not only brought torrential rains to the entire Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, to the point where the National Weather Service issued airport weather advisories and warnings about river flooding. The warnings even included the term “gusty outflow winds,” which sounds more as if it belongs in a review of a chili cookoff than a weather report. The upshot is that we had, once again, the classic North Texas view of rain coming in just short of horizontal. Wind, even a bit of hail, too. Everyone in the area went to the window, gasped a bit at the carnage, and went back to work.

I did that, too, and went out to the growing area that evening after finishing with the Day Job. One of those gusty outflow winds brapped across the area, snapped off about 200 pounds of branch off a big silverleaf maple on the property, and then dropped it right atop the greenhouse frame. THe greenhouse frame has a dent on one side, and the entire ceiling brace is bent beyond repair. However, that giant collection of branches came down right where I was growing Sarracenia a week ago, and if that frame hadn’t been there, they would have been destroyed. Flattened. Turned to Sarracenia mush and a lot of splattered growing mix. I’m now certain that the greenhouse frame gave its life so that the pitcher plants would continue.

Because of this, I’ll no longer look askance at buying anything at Harbor Freight, or at any of the Czarina’s seemingly wacky ideas. I will, however, have grand fun messing with her on the selection of birthday presents.

Tales From The Ranch: Introducing Dasymutilla klugii

While wandering around the ranch, the Czarina and I ran into an old friend, well, enemy, from my adolescence. We were tromping around close to the bank on the Brazos river, and spotted and surprised a rather interesting lizard. While circling around to get a photo so I could ID it later, she suddenly exclaimed “What the hell is THAT?” In a small sapling was what initially appeared to be a rust-colored ball of fluff, and the fluff was moving. That’s when we had a reminder that cowbirds weren’t the only parasites on the ranch.

Dasymutilla klugii

That fuzzball is most likely a female Dasymutilla klugii, commonly known as a velvet ant. Velvet ants are members of the family Mutillidae, part of the same superfamily of insects that includes wasps, stinging ants, and hornets. The velvet ants are flightless wasps found through North America, but they’re rarely seen by most people. It’s not that they’re incredibly rare, but that a combination of rough habitat and a tendency to stay away from human habitations means that they’re not encountered all that often.

More velvet ant

Eric Grissell’s book Bees, Wasps, and Ants: The Indispensable Role of Hymenoptera in Gardens still qualifies as one of the best general interest books on wasps published in the last fifty years, and even it doesn’t have all that much on velvet ants. That lack of knowledge is due to their being poorly studied. What’s known for certain is that they tend to be exoparasites of exoparasites. Many species take advantage of hunting wasps’ industriousness by waiting until a mother wasp digs a nesting gallery, gathers paralyzed prey to feed her young, and lays an egg atop said host. The velvet ant sneaks into the gallery while the mother wasp is away and lays its own egg next to the wasp’s egg. The velvet ant larva hatches first, and it first eats the wasp egg and then the host before pupating and emerging as an adult velvet ant. Other than that, it’s known that the females are flightless while the males are winged, and the females pack an impressive sting, to the point where they’re also called “cow-killers” or “mule-droppers”.

Dasymutilla klugii

Obviously, I wasn’t insane enough to test the stories, because I tend to pay attention to warnings along the lines of “much more painful than a bee sting”. I settled for watching it scramble through the sapling, desperately looking for something that it couldn’t quite find, before leaving it to go about its business.

And how was this an old friend/enemy? Being a kid of the northern US, my views on Texas were based on reading, particularly a copy of the book Poisonous Dwellers of the Desert by Natt N. Dodge that had been left at my house by a friend when I was nine. By the time I was thirteen, I had read that book to death, regaling everyone with horror tales of cone-nosed bugs, puss caterpillars, the multiple species of scorpion and dangerously venomous spiders to be found in the Chihuahuan and Sonoran Deserts. After I informed a honeybee-stung neighbor that scraping out the sting is much better than pulling it out, she asked me how I knew this, and I merely pointed to the paragraph in question. At that point, nobody in the family questioned me about the arthropodal horrors we’d encounter in North Texas, even after my mother was playing solitaire on the floor of our new living room in Flowermound and put down the 10 of hearts atop a bark scorpion that was checking out the neighborhood. (Two days later, she found another in a huge crock bowl she used for making popcorn. That one became the basis for my first experiment in encasing a scorpion in epoxy, but that’s another story.)

Anyway, the summer of 1980 not only brought us the hottest summer in North Texas history, only possibly exceeded by the droughts of record of 1952 and 2011, but it brought out all sorts of critters. At the time, I lived on the edge of a huge subdivision that was under construction through the year, and honed my then barely existent tracking skills by chasing down the multitude of new animals that I’d never before encountered. One of these was a similar ball of fluff, and I knew well enough about not letting it sting. What I didn’t know is that velvet ants also bite. HARD. I yelled and flung it as far away as I could before it could reacquire a stinging target, and that was the last velvet ant I would see for nearly one-third of a century. And so it goes.

Tales From The Ranch: Spot the Horsecrippler

As mentioned several months back, I’ve become extremely fond of the West Texas barrel cactus Echinocactus texensis. It’s not impressive, like many other species of barrel cactus. In fact, the reason why one of its common names is “horsecrippler” is that between blending into the local soil and growing in areas with lots of grassy cover, only two circumstances allow most people or animals to see one before they step on it. If the cactus isn’t blooming or bearing fruit, they’re nearly impossible to see without a very careful view of the locale.

Don’t believe me? Let’s play the latest Triffid Ranch game, “Spot the Horsecrippler”. Within the photo below are fourE. texensis in plain sight. Can you spot them? (I’ll even give a hint: two are directly in the center of the photo, one is up and to the right, while the last is over on the upper left.)

Spot the Horsecrippler Cactus 1

Okay, to be fair, we’re looking at a smaller photo, with standard Web-ready resolution. Let’s go for a much closer view. Spot any of them now?

Spot the Horsecrippler Cactus 2

If you didn’t spot any, congratulations. You now see why these cactus can be dangerous to humans and animals. If you did, I know a few red-tailed hawks who want to steal your eyes and use them for themselves. The problem isn’t just that horsecripplers are down low. It’s that they flatten out over the ground, and with a bit of grass and some faded flower blooms, they’re almost invisible.

Spot the Horsecrippler Cactus 3

As mentioned before, at two times of the year is E. texensis easily visible, and for the same reasons. The blooms are gigantic compared to the cactus’s diameter, all the better for bees and other pollinators to see. The other time is when the fruit ripens, so it catches the eye of birds and other-color-seeking herbivores. Between the color and the scent, the fruit attracts everything from lizards to mice to pigs, and the seeds (roughly the size and consistency of buckshot) either scatter as the fruit is eaten or in the diner’s feces. Either way, after the fruit is gone, the cactus goes back to complete, welcome obscurity.

Spot the Horsecrippler Cactus 4

This isn’t to say that all E. texensis are, and forgive the pun, wallflowers. Occasionally, one comes across mutants with attention issues, growing well above the height of their neighbors. In garden and container environments, where nutrients and water are much more available than in the wild, horsecripplers will grow much larger and rounder, but not necessarily taller. This one is definitely E. texensis, based on the spine pattern and shape, but it may be interesting to see what happens with subsequent generations over the next few centuries. (Considering how slowly horsecripplers grow, this will have to be a multigenerational effort. Most of the cactus in these photos are at least 40 to 50 years old, and many out on the ranch may be two centuries old. Time for more research.)

Spot the Horsecrippler Cactus 5

All of this leads to speculation with, to paraphrase Joe Bob Briggs, absolutely no facts to get in the way of the story. Most smaller cactus species go for either cryptic coloration or impressive spines, and rarely do they go with both. If anything, most barrel cactus species herald their spines to encourage animals to walk and seek food elsewhere. Horsecripplers not only flatten out, but they also put down an impressive taproot to keep them anchored, and nothing alive today other than humans has the determination and the apparatus necessary to pull one out of the ground to eat it. What I wonder is if some form of the Pleistocene megafauna that used to wander this area during the last big glaciation had a taste for horsecrippler ancestors, deliberately seeking them out in grassland and pulling them up. If this was something that both had the time to dig up the cactus and had strong enough claws to scrape out the hard soil underneath, it explains why horsecripplers have such strong spines. Horses and cattle wouldn’t waste their time trying to chew on one, but what about ground sloths and glyptodonts?

Ah, now there’s an image you weren’t expecting to get from a gardening blog, were you? Naturally, this is all pure speculation based on E. texensis structure, and it can’t be proved without examples of glyptodont scat that show bits of chewed-up horsecrippler. The image, though, sticks. Texas gardeners already have enough of a problem with nine-banded armadillos digging up lawns and flowerbeds in the night in search of grubs and insects. Now just picture a vegetarian armadillo the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, galumphing into your back yard in a mad search for native cactus. Just remember: you have to sleep sometime.

Tales From The Ranch: And now for the horror

And before poor Dave gets into his head that I’m going to stop joshing him, I have to share the story of the ceiling fan birdnest. The area around the ranch is habitat for the black-tailed gnatcatcher (Polioptila melanura), and they spend most afternoons and evenings snagging as many insects as they can manage. When not hunting, they spend their time watching us crazy humans, mostly to take advantage of the situation.

Black-tailed gnatcatcher

“Taking advantage of the situation,” in this case, refers to using appropriate human structures to facilitate their own nestmaking. Specifically, they like using the house located on the property, particularly the big open deck on the back. Shortly after arriving at the ranch for the last big family gathering, my sister-in-law found this nest atop a ceiling fan over the deck, and a quick peek showed that it had eggs and at least one hatchling.

Gnatcatcher nest

Getting up to the nest to observe further had issues, the least of which was the lack of head clearance above the ceiling fan blades. Tilting the blades to get a better view risked knocking the nest off the fan. In the end, my nephew Bruce and I settled for putting cameras up to the nest, taking whatever pictures we could, and backing off before the parents came back. After doing so, we had a bit of a surprise.

Gnatcatcher nest contents

If you’re observant, you’ll note that the hatchling inside the nest, while still blind and helpless, is considerably larger than its eggs. You may also note that the eggs aren’t the same color. That’s because both the hatchling and one of the eggs both belong to a brown-headed cowbird (Molothrus ater), which is also common to the area. Cowbirds get their name because of their otherwise encouraging habit of picking ticks and other pests from cattle, bison, and other big herd animals. Since bison herds are migratory, the cowbirds evolved to take advantage of other birds’ instincts and parasitize them. The mother cowbird arrives at a nest while the parents are gone, lays one to two eggs, and moves on, reasonably assured that the foster parents will lay on the clutch and feed the hatchlings as they emerge. Gnatcatchers seem to be particularly susceptible, with reports of 100 percent parasitism of all gnatcatcher nests in surveyed areas.

This led to quite the spirited debate. My sister-in-law argued for scaring off the gnatcatchers so the cowbird chicks would starve, being offended by the idea that the cowbirds were parasites. I argued instead for leaving well enough alone, because at least this way the gnatcatcher eggs wouldn’t be a complete waste. Besides, being very much unlike my own family, I could appreciate the cowbird chick’s situation. We left that weekend with the nest intact, and I suspect that I might see one of the cowbirds the next time I visit, inexplicably relieved that we left it alone. And so it goes.

Tales From The Ranch

One of the main draws of my in-laws’ ranch is the spectacular view of the Brazos River valley, especially from one particular rock known as “Lookout Point”. As I keep telling Dave Hutchinson, the stories about Texas being completely flat are untrue even outside of the Hill Country near Austin or the Pecos Mountains. It’s just that the sky overwhelms everything else. In that case, Texas is exactly like Australia. And just think: 350 million years ago, this was all shallow seabed.

Lookout Point

Mesa from Lookout Point

Cactus at Lookout Point

Brazos River, facing south

Tales From The Ranch

As background, my father-in-law bought The Ranch back in the early Seventies, when land prices were ridiculously cheap in West Texas. The locale had been used quite a bit over the last century, and not just as farmland or cattle ranch: since the local rocks are all Pennsylvanian sandstones and limestones, one area was the source for much of the distinct limestone of the Palo Pinto County Courthouse. Naturally, some previous visitors took from the ranch, and others left behind:

Beer Truck

In my never-ending efforts to drive the Czarina a little more-silver-haired than I have already, I suggested that we haul this truck home, fix it up, and use it as the official Triffid Ranch truck. All it needs is a set of new tires and maybe a few spots of WD-40 before it’s streetlegal, right?

Tales from the Ranch

Several big intrusions from real life get in the way, so it’s time for a bit of backstory. The Czarina’s family owns a rather large ranch in West Texas, alongside the Brazos River, and it’s become quite the playground for the extended clan. Her parents come out regularly to relax when their own workday routines start to tear them down. The kids and the grandkids (with possible great-grandkids very soon) come out to fish, race all-terrain vehicles, and wonder “Hey, what the hell is Paul doing this time?” And me, I come out there to study.

In any case, I’ve spent the last ten years doing my best to convince my UK friend Dave Hutchinson is nothing but an elaborate set for Peter Jackson’s planned remake of The Valley of Gwangi. If only: I may be joshing him, but it’s odd enough out here as it is. For a moment, though, I’ll spare him the horror of what my adoptive land is like, and settle for a few moments of beauty.

Unknown wildflower

Unknown wildflower 2

Unknown wildflower 3

Very, VERY bad ideas

For those unfamiliar with The Pitcher Plant Project, I heartily recommend spending a few hours going through the blog . Of particular note, though, is taking a look at The Sarracenia Sink, because I’ve been suggesting to the Czarina that I could up the ante a bit. Many of my neighbors are renovating bathrooms and kitchens, which means that a lot of perfectly serviceable toilets are left out front in time for Large Trash Day. I figure that it’s just a matter of sealing up the bottom, filling both bowl and tank with Sarracenia soil mix, planting a nice collection of pitcher plants and sundews, and bringing it to the next Triffid Ranch show. Not only is it a perfect example of classic Scottish frugality to make the world a better place, but Mother Scotland even gave me a perfect name for the arrangement: “The Bog Garden”. All it would need is an Ewan MacGregor action figure in it, and it would be perfect.

The only problem with this plan lies with the Czarina. See, her family is Welsh, not Scot, so she doesn’t agree that this is a brilliant plan. In fact, she stopped rolling her eyes or jabbing me with her elbows when we drive by an abandoned toilet and I suggest upcycling it. She only had one thing to say if I continued on this line of inquiry. I didn’t exactly hear what she was planning to do to my neck after she ripped my head off, but based on her tone, I’m going to have to surprise her with the end results.

Have a Great Weekend

The school year just ended in Texas. Hit the swimming pools, kids. You have no idea how badly you’ll miss summer vacation when you’re in your forties.