yep, fifth snow

From around six until perhaps midnight last Saturday, it snowed. There was a moderate northwest wind in the early evening, picking up to a real gale overnight, so the snow was tightly plastered to the north sides of trunks. A few trees, like these, ended up looking like birches.









The fruit trees were all in pretty full bloom, peach and Chickasaw plum, with the Mexican plum getting started. I was quite worried for the crop, as the temperature got down to at least 28°. These Mexican plum flowers, like many, have a hood of snow.











These are the little plum-thicket bush plums (these on the tank dam). The flowers are about half as big as those on the Mexican plum trees. The stamens are fewer, with colorful orange pollen.





At the tank gate, the wet soil had melted most of the snow as it landed. Larger white areas are snow; the little white dots are fallen plum and pear petals. The petals are often referred to poetically as covering the ground like snow, but not usually beside snow.


In the backyard the peaches were pink mists within the snow in the cloudy dawn. But to my pleased surprise, in the early afternoon when the temperature had gotten up to nearly 40° and the snow was about gone, the peach flowers were still just as pink, with no brown edges. Seems like all the pistils made it through just fine. Peach pies and plum jelly after all!


And it's been extremely interesting to experience all these different varieties of snowfall, in one weird winter. But really, enough is enough. These pictures were taken on March 21, "the first day of spring," and we had better not have a sixth snow.

Just sayin'.

yipes! more snow?

Forecast:
Tonight
Cloudy with a 50 percent chance of snow. Windy. Snow accumulation up to 1 inch. Lows in the lower 30s. Northwest winds 20 to 30 mph with gusts to around 40 mph. Wind chill readings as low as 18 to 23.
Sunday
Cloudy. A 30 percent chance of snow in the morning. Windy. Snow accumulation up to 1 inch. Total snow accumulation up to 2 inches. Highs in the mid 40s. Northwest winds 20 to 30 mph with gusts to around 40 mph. Wind chill readings as low as 19 to 24.

Just when the plums and the peaches are all in bloom. Bah, humbug!

Can only hope it will be a degree or two warmer than they say.

pictures of little plants

This is a very image-heavy post, already out-of-date, because I took the photos a week ago, and spring is springing apace! Click on any photo for an enlarged view.

This Jackson Pollack-like closeup of the budding plum thicket shows only buds; now it's in bloom. In this photo it is still a complex mass of gray twigs, bearing pale green blobs of buds.



Walking down the lane, I observed that the sporophyte generation of the local bryophytes is about mature.
The mosses and liverworts have to do their genetic recombination at a time when the sperm can swim through the surface moisture on the plant to get to the archegonia structures where the egg cells are -- no bees to carry pollen for them! So this cycle definitely cannot happen in July -- late winter is their time.

Now the gametes have met and fused, the diploid spore-producing part of the life cycle has grown, and the spores are about to be released to drift to a new potential home.



Water on the plant surfaces has actually not been a problem this season. The greenish spot in the left center of this view of the wet, privet/greenbriery thicket by the pot-holey lane, when examined closely, is a puddle full of filamentous algae. This shows that it has beet continuously wet for a long time. Where'd the algae come from? Beats me. I'm not an expert on the drought-survival strategies of the local algae.

A few days after this picture was taken, this submerged green patch of algae had multiplied its mass and floated up to make a bubbly mat on the surface.



Poking up through the dry oak leaves by the lane in the low woods are the first leaves of the white violets. Amy tells me today that the plants I sent to her in Houston are beginning to bloom, and are sturdy plants with a dozen leaves or more. This one has a ways to go — I believe it has five little leaves so far. Isabel always looked for them by her birthday, March 27, in Cooke County; here they are usually in bloom by mid-March. Not this year, though, I don't think.
[edit — 25 March — three or four plants have flowers]


Here is the runoff water merrily trickling around, over, and through the old cookstove "erosion control." More non-vascular plants are evident, though I haven't worked my way through the privet and briers to get a close look.


I have noticed several of these bright orange fungi on dead twigs on the woods floor recently. Several lichens are also evident here.


And finally I saw some actual flowers on the walk, these tiny bluets. I need to look them up; I think they are an introduced "weed," not a native. But anyway they have flowers, which I was longing to see.

Christmas eve "blizzard"

This is NOT normal Christmas Eve weather! The forecasters, up until almost when it happened, thought we might get a few flurries. It snowed from around 1 pm (after a gradual transition from cold rain) till about 10 pm, all the while with 30-mph winds, gusting to 40 mph, and the temperature gradually dropping from 35° to 25°. B-r-r-r-r!





Another view of those two plum trees. Visibility is actually fairly good here. I took these as I was leaving the Ridge about 3pm; by the time I got to Denton visibility was about a block.

I am eager for March, when I can see these "hung with snow" in the poetical sense, like Housman's cherries, rather than this all too literal version (not that any of it was hanging about, with that wind)!

I took some video of the birds, which I will try to get edited and on youtube. I had gotten the feeder hung from a wire between the living room eave and the shrubbery, out of reach of the coons. But I didn't allow for the effect of 40-mph gusts on the shrubbery; the nail holding the wire pulled out of the eave rafter. I rehung the feeder directly from the eave, just 18 inches from the windows. The birds didn't seem to care.

Here's a cardinal outside the kitchen window on the big rock, chowing down on sunflower seeds. Generally, I seem to have cardinals (at least six males seen simultaneously), chickadees, titmice, Harris sparrows, a fox sparrow, whitethroats (more heard than seen), and two towhees.



Christmas was lovely and sunny, up to nearly 40°, so it melted fast. This brushy area down by the lane that we hadn't gotten around to mowing was transformed on Christmas morning. By the afternoon it was back to just being brush.



This is a big plum tree (I think) in the field above the gate. The guys timed themselves clearing it -- it took about an hour to free the trunk. They simply cut the briers off and left the strands up in the canopy. Picture every gray line in the canopy continued down to the ground, and you will have a "before" picture. I think it's worth doing with all the trees in that field. There should still be plenty of briery thickets nearby to provide wildlife cover!

So that was our white Christmas -- the first I can remember here. All melted now except in the very shadiest spots.

is it a haystack?

No, it's a plum tree! Eddie and Stephen did a thorough haircut, shave, manicure, and pedicure on the two Mexican Plums near the house, transforming them back into trees, mulching up a quantity of greenbrier.












Here Stephen takes the high road, pulling out briers with a cultivating fork for a rake.
Eddie takes the low with the DR mower, making it possible to actually walk under the tree. I understand that Stephen was precariously up a ladder at one time, so determined they became to eradicate the upper crown of briers. I missed that.





The plums were sort of pretty last March. They are going to be MUCH NICER this spring. And! I'm going to be able to pick the plums without groveling for the fallen ones among the brier stems.

Wild Plum

They are unholy who are born
To love wild plum at night,
Who once have passed it on a road
Glimmering and white.

It is as though the darkness had
Speech of silver words,
Or as though a cloud of stars
Perched like ghostly birds.

They are unpitied from their birth
And homeless in men's sight,
Who love, better than the earth,
Wild plum at night.

Orrick Johns, in The New Poetry: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Verse in English. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1923


(OK, truthful admission here, the photo was taken last Saturday in the daytime; the night-time effect is compliments of Adobe. But my admiration for the poem, and for the effect of wild plum in the moonlight, is unchanged. And the scent! the poet didn't mention the scent!
If any flowers remain tomorrow after the winds of tonight's cold front blow through, and if it isn't cloudy and rainy, I may try for a night-time photograph. Too bad I didn't think of it sooner, during the last few balmy clear full-moon nights.)

more chiefs than indians

Wearing my hat as one of the publicity committee photographers, I accompanied a city Parks/Rec-sponsored walk at Cross Timbers park. For the city, the staffer for such activities (I forget her name). For the public, four Brownies and their troop leader. For the naturalists, Dorothy Thetford, Dave Rowley, Marilyn Blanton, Joe Bain, Joanna Fellows and her husband, me, and I think a couple more I have forgotten. [edit - Sharon Barr, Tracy Durmick from city, and the woman who joined us midway.]

We saw several redbuds, just starting to bloom. The mexican plums are glorious! And the scent — aaaaahh! Also a real infestation of privet, which we pointed out and explained too. For herbaceous wildflowers, there were Antennaria (pussytoes) up near the lake.

Since I was last at the park, they have added a wonderful steep, dirt section up to the Lake Forest lake. You can hike one-way now from Hickory Creek Road to Lake Forest Park and the dog park, off of Ryan Road. I especially am glad they have a section of one-person-wide dirt trail, as opposed to the gravel "road" of the main trail.

We all got pretty good exercise; the total distance was something between 1.5 and 1.7 miles. Just about the longest the little girls were up to. Me, too. Really got to get in better shape!

So, a nice morning. Cloudy, temperature in the 70s, pretty breezy. Good company, and! two more hours for my service record. (Plus another hour, conservatively figured, for labelling, exporting, getting disc to Dorothy, etc. Dorothy called to say how much she liked the one I managed to send her online.)

in like a lion ...

Well, the first couple of nights of March were fairly lion-ish, and since then we have also had some fairly ferocious winds, but the temperature has become positively lamb-ly. Although it is rapidly growing up to a full-sized sheep, all hot and smelly. 87° yesterday was more spring than most people wanted. We are promised a cold front next week, and I sincerely hope it is a 40° front, and not a 20° arctic special.

The daffodils have mostly done their thing. The early ones got frost-nipped, and the later ones were fairly rapidly shriveled up by the hot dry wind. No rain to speak of for weeks, sigh. The redbuds are beginning, and the Chickasaw plum thicket at the Ridge is a billow of off-white specks.

olives olives olives (Texas var.)

Went down to the Fort Worth Nature Center yesterday for a winter woody plants ID walk yesterday, led by Suzanne Tuttle. I almost didn't; I've been in bed for a week or more, miserable and sick or depressed or both, but it had been scheduled for months, and I kicked myself into going. Glad I did. Only problem was I was pretty unfit, but it was a slow amble with stops to look at stuff, so no real problem. Betty Zajac, of the Denton naturalists, was there, and she did fall from an unexpected root under her foot. I was afraid I might, but made out OK. And her tumble did her no harm.

I saw one plant I had totally never heard of, Elbow Bush, Forestiera pubescens. Sprawly little deciduous gray thing that was already blooming, little puffs of quarter-inch yellow-green anthers here and there. It's in the olive family, which was actually fairly well represented -— Texas ash, green ash, privet, Japanese ligustrum (both being eliminated, maybe). Also turns out that lilac and forsythia are Oleaceae.

Another new one, that I had heard of before but not seen to know it, was Eve's Necklace, a tree in the Leguminosae, excuse me, Fabaceae. Also in the family, mesquite and honey locust, Gleditsia triacanthos – three-branched spines. Boy, it's a well-armed tree! I don't know if I will recognize Eve's Necklace if I see it again or not; it didn't make a huge distinct impression.

There was a very early Mexican plum blooming; also a pear (non-native) down by the waterside. Today I'll have to get out to feed poor Buddy (made it back to D&L in the nick of time to get him some food, but I was tired and came on home with it). Maybe the big pear's blooming there. I hope Bud's OK after last night's hard freeze; the weather underground site says it was 21! That's way, way colder than I thought it would be. I should have really taken him his food yesterday evening.

So, nice sunny afternoon, sort of sore muscles (muscles? what muscles?) and three hours AT for my master naturalist log.