the largest pecan tree in the world
It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon and we just felt like getting out of town. I had read about a garden in Weatherford that was open to the public and we decided to drive there and see it. With time on our hands afterwards we drove back through town and found a tourist center at the edge of downtown. It was open and we walked into a small room with a counter and an assortment of brochures and guidebooks.
We found somethng interesting. It was a photo-copied page with a black and white photo of a tree and a brief paragraph headlined “Largest Pecan Tree in the World.” There was a little map that showed it was just 3.5 miles north on Highway 51. The guy behind the counter had never been there, but Highway 51 was right outside the door. I pulled the car out of the gravel lot and headed north through the farmland, measuring the miles on the odometer.
I have always been happiest in the company of trees. When I was a freshman in Houston I used to take my books out to a grove of pine and oak in a forgotten corner of the campus and sit underneath a tree reading in the warm afternoons. Sometimes I would pace back and forth and read my essays out loud. I cannot recall ever seeing another person in that grove. Except for the squirrels and birds I had it all to myself. Years later I think I remember the trees better than the books I was struggling to understand. I would stay there until the light played out and then head back to my dorm along sidewalks set between parallel rows of oaks drenched in Spanish moss. In the waning light the trees seemed dark and mysterious and at the same time compelling.
Maybe my affinity for trees comes from having grown up in a forest. The property I grew up on southeast of Fort Worth was part of the Crosstimbers, once an impenetrable forest of trees with wood so hard that it was called the "cast iron forest." I did not realize that it was a forest until years later after the property had been sold. The trees were post oak and blackjack oak, what some call scrub oak because they are small and scrawny. Of course they had been thinned out to make room for suburban housing. My parents planted their own favorites - crepe myrtle, redbud and two tall pines in the front yard - but it was the small oaks with lichen-covered bark that I played under and learned to love. I have driven by the property recently. The pines now dominate the street, but the oaks all still seem to be about the same size. They are probably much older than their size would make them seem.
We passed a small sign by the side of the road that said “big tree” and had to double back. We saw a small farmhouse with a driveway, but we were reluctant to turn in there. The paper we had picked up warned that the tree was on private property but said the owners welcomed visitors. A couple hundred yards further I turned the car off onto a dirt road between a ploughed and fenced field and a pasture. The road wound past a barn and then toward a clearing in a line of trees. That looked like the destination.
But as we passed the barn I saw in my rearview mirror a man waving his arms. Apprehensively I stopped the car and got out. It was the farmer who owned the place. He knew we were looking for the tree but sure enough he did not mind. Although it turned out we were heading the wrong way and he would prefer that we park the car and walk before we got it stuck. He pointed the way and we set out across the field. We crossed a dried-up creek on a footbridge and passed into the woods.
The trunk of the pecan was huge and gnarled. It’s enormous branches dipped low to the ground. Tricia and I stood at each edge of the canopy and tried to guess how far apart we were. The literature said the tree was 91 feet tall and over 200 feet across. It was believed to be over 1000 years old. We looked for pecans underneath and found a few but they were old and broken. It was not the right season.
A grove of trees always seems like a special place. Prairie Point is such a place. Over 150 years ago pioneers established a church there in a grove of oaks. The church closed its doors long ago but people from all over still gather there every year in July for a picnic. They bring food and set it out for everyone to eat on long boards nailed between the oaks. After they have eaten and socialized most head for the cemetery beyond the fence where they have friends or relatives.
Groves were some of the earliest sacred places. My ancestors worshipped the spirits of trees in ancient European forests, as have people of many other cultures. Maybe they were on to something. Touching the trunk of the big pecan it was hard not to feel that there was a consciousness there that transcended our own.
We walked back to the car and drove to the farmhouse. We signed the guestbook on the front porch and petted the dogs and then got back in the car and drove back the way we had come. We stopped at a farmers market and bought a watermelon. Weatherford is famous for its watermelon. Back home we sat outside in the warm evening under our own much younger grove of pecans and ate watermelon and spat the seeds onto the lawn.
This is part of the discussion on "trees and place" at the Ecotone wiki.
confluence
From Joel at Pax Nortona I learned of The Degree Confluence Project, which has its goal to "visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location"
These are the entries for the four intersections nearest me:
33N 97W 33N 96W
32N 97W 32N 96W
another kind of prairie point
Tricia tells me that those triangles along the border of this new quilt she is working on are called "prairie points."
Some of those fabrics are ones I helped pick out when we stopped at quilt shops on our road trips. I like western patterns and she's worked them into several quilts she's made recently. This one is partly inspired by a visit we made to the Cowgirl Hall of Fame.
anticipation
I'm expecting a new machine from Dell any day now. After reading the troubles Fred has been having I'm wondering if I made the right decision. This time I'm getting a laptop so I can work out on the patio instead of being cooped up inside all the time.
Actually it's Tricia who needs a new machine more than I do. Her clunker is about five years old and we cannot get it to communicate with the printer any more. It's also very slow on some of the new quilt design software she uses. But I've been wanting a laptop and she wants a machine like this one, so I made a deal with her.
green calculator
Like to take quizzes? You can estimate the amount of carbon dioxide you generate with this calculator at the National Wildlife Federation site.
I came out about average. Hope you do better.
silly cat
Tricia and I saw this cat pillow at an antique mall and it brought a smile. Later she surprised me by presenting it to me as a gift. Now it prowls our living room couch.
Surprisingly none of the other kitties act the least bit territorial about it.
tree bark
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I have been trying without success to put captions under pictures. I am sure somebody out there knows how.
Update: Thanks to Kathy of Cold Climate Gardening for the instructions for the captions. See the comment.
experiencing technical difficulties
We have had a whole series of technical problems lately with our phone service.
It started with a lot of static on the line. Then a weird thing occurred over the weekend. A couple of technicians from where I work had called me on separate phones for help with a system problem. I started answering a question from one of them and then when I paused I was surprised to hear a different person on the line. Just as suddenly that person was gone and the first one was back, explaining that his line had gone dead and he had redialed. Then my boss jumped in wanting an update on the problem and I was playing roulette with three different callers. I couldn't really be sure who I was talking to. It would have made a good Abbott and Costello comedy routine.
My wife checked with the phone service and found out we had had call waiting installed unbeknowst to us. We had never subscribed to call waiting but it turned out that the phone company had switched us on to it to compensate for a loss of some other obscure feature on our DSL service that was being discontinued. Since we both generally prefer to finish one call before starting another, we put in an order to have that turned off. Which they did but not before we had a couple other weird conversations like the first one.
Of course that is not how call waiting is supposed to work anyway. You are supposed to get a signal that you have another call and then be able to choose to accept it. It's not supposed to just hang up the first caller and automatically accept the second. So we had a phone man out at the house to check that out. Finally he found a short in a line which apparently provided just enough line interrupt to seem like the signal to switch. Fixing this cleared up the static also.
After he had left we discovered that our second line now has no dial tone. So now we have another order in to get that fixed.
interlude
Late evening yesterday we got clouds and lightning but no rain. But the cool front did lower the temperatures by 7 or 8 degrees.
I spent time outside this evening without feeling like I was in a furnace. Got the clippers out of the shed and trimmed off some of those long tendrils that snake out from the wisteria in the summer and wrap themselves around everything within reach.
Then sat on the front porch swing for a spell and leafed through a magazine while listening to the crickets until it got too dark to see, and then I just watched the fireflys for awhile.
burning down the town
This 103 year old building was destroyed by fire yesterday in Kerens, Texas. Another old building also burned and a third was damaged in what remains of the downtown area. A similar fire in 1996 had destroyed the buildings on the other side of the street.
My parents live near here and have a long association with this town. The downtown is little more than a ghost town now but my Dad claims that when he used to go there as a young man on Saturdays it was so crowded that he could barely get down the sidewalks.
The downtown died as the bank and grocery and other businesses moved out to strip-style shops on the highway. The school which was nearby was consolidated with another on the outskirts of town. The last time I was there a couple of struggling antique stores and a real estate office were the only businesses open.
a visit to a plant museum
This morning I drove to Fort Worth to join a tour of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, or BRIT.
A few years ago they published a massive tome called Shinner's and Mahler's Flora of North Central Texas. Despite the high price I bought a copy and I've been glad I did. Ever since, I have wanted to learn more about the place.
BRIT is one of the largest herbariums in the country. A herbarium, as I learned today, is a kind of special museum or repository for plant specimens, which are pressed and dried, then mounted on sheets of 11x16 paper. BRIT houses over a million such mounted specimens. They are used by botanists for plant identification and classification, who either go there to view them or request that the specimens be loaned to a closer herbarium.
New species are still being discovered fairly frequently. When that happens the specimens become especially important. The first specimen establishes the definition for the species, and later specimens are compared against it to see if they are different or the same. Each new species must also have it's description published in Latin.
Anyone can submit a specimen, although most come from botanists or research assistants. BRIT has so many specimens waiting to be mounted and catalogued that they estimate it will take them 76 years to catch up at their present rate. And I was worried that I was getting a little behind at the office! Most of these specimens are not new species however, but familiar species found in a new location.
They also have over 75,000 books on plants, including many rare and antique volumes. We saw a copy of the 1836 British journal in which the Texas bluebonnet was first identified and named. Assistant director Barney Lipscomb, who showed us around the library, is something of a showman and has an amazing ability to make his profession seem fascinating.
It was an entertaining and educational visit.
hedges
Our house came with privet hedges on each side of the front lawn. I am not really a fan of privet and seriously thought of taking it out, perhaps replacing it with something more interesting. But both my neighbors at the time liked it and I decided to let it stay as long as it was understood that I had no intention of keeping it clipped. It isn't completely out of control though. A couple times a year the top is cut at around 6 foot high, which is tall enough to provide a nice privacy screen without being overwhelming.
The hedge also make a great shelter for the birds and our cats like to hide in it too.
This past winter one of the plants died and left a gap. Once again we talked about what to do with the hedge. Replace the missing plant. Tear the whole thing down and replace it with roses or wax myrtle. In the end we did nothing.
Then our neighbor installed an antique garden arch in the opening and planted some vines on it. We like it. She is a gardener too and we get along well with her. We still have most of the privacy, but we are not walled off.
turk's cap
Turk's cap (Malvaviscus arboreus) looks good in the shade this time of year. I've been planting it as a forest understory kind of plant, along with coralberry and white avens.
It's small red flowers bloom through October on a plant that gets about three feet tall and about as wide. According to the literature they are pollinated by ruby-throated hummingbirds, but I've never seen any on it. Actually I have only seen the black-chinned hummingbirds locally anyway and never on this plant.
The broad dark leaves seem kind of tropical. They remind me of hibiscus to which turk's cap is related. The flower does too. Sort of like a hibiscus flower that doesn't ever open.
our old suburban home
This place of ours was once in the "suburbs." Our house was built in 1946, which makes it older than us. Most of the houses around here were built a little later than that, a few earlier. North of here virtually all of the houses are newer. From that I conclude that at the time it was built our house was near the edge of town. By my thinking that means it was in the suburbs, even though it might have been within the city limits at the time.
The man who built this house operated a restaurant in Highland Park Village, one of the country's first shopping centers, a few miles closer to downtown. He had children who attended the local school. In fact I suspect that most of the people who lived around here were young families with children. When we moved here though it was primarily empty nesters or childless households.
If you take suburban to simply mean the new housing at the edge of the metropolis then almost every place around here either has been suburban at some time or will be in the future. Now most people would call our place "inner-city" or even "downtown." Once it was part of a farm and before that it is said to have been an Indian campsite. I can travel 20 miles to the north today and see farms that I know will very soon be subdivided into housing developments or shopping centers.
Age has given the neighborhood character and, in my eye, added value. People have lived here and made their mark on it. That is what makes the difference between a neighborhood like this one and a new one. I think most people though prefer the new.
This is part of the Ecotone discussion on "suburbs."
mysteries of cat behavior
Sapphire likes to bring us things in the night. It used to be a set of coasters woven in China perhaps of some basket-like fiber. Every morning we would collect them from the hallway and bedroom and return them to the coffee table in the living room.
Lately it has been pens and pencils from my desk. She makes a low growling sound deep in her throat as she carries them down the hallway and then drops them heavily just inside the entrance to the bedroom. Is she bringing these to me because she thinks I may be needing them?
july flowers
As we begin summer in the garden, let's take a survey of what is going on. Texas betony is starting to fade. The winecups are still producing every day but have fewer flowers. The Mexican hat and the blanket flower are about finished. The day lilies in the front bed still have one or two more blooms yet to open.
Salvia greggii are still producing occasional blooms. Like the lantanas which are just beginning to bloom in our yard, their best season will come in the fall. We have three types of lantana - the blue, the gold and the pink and yellow varieties.
Zexmenia and turk's cap are in full bloom as is the abelia. They are heat lovers. The flame acanthus is covered with red. The Mexican oregano continues to bloom steadily. Four-nerve daisy is always in bloom. The globe amaranth we planted last year has come back very strong. So far the ruellias have not bloomed as proficiently as in years past, however. Gaura is also not doing as well as usual.
Pavonia greets us cheerfully in the morning with bright pink flowers, as does the weedy widows tears with their bright blue flowers that we allow to persist here and there. Morning is also a good time to catch Jimson weed with its flowers fully open. They open just at nightfall and last until mid-morning.
We also have blooms on many of the roses. The iceberg in particular is doing well, but the rouletii also continue to flower steadily.
And of course the sunflowers.
hailstorm
Just at nightfall yesterday we had a dramatic storm. I had lingered outside to talk with a neighbor as the clouds built up and had just got inside as hail started to hit. Most of the hailstones were about the size of marbles but a few were as big as golfballs. It was as if somebody were throwing ice cubes from the roof. They were hitting hard too and making a lot of noise bouncing off the roof and driveway. I was worried about window glass breaking.
Hail has always been a feature of the weather here although it seems to be more frequent nowadays. That's a purely subjective statement on my part, but it also seems to be the position of the insurance industry. I'd like to see some statistics to back it up. No damage at all to our garden. All the plants perked up today from the generous rain that followed the hail.
I snapped this morning glory on a trellis at the entrance to our neighbor's garden. I am not sure what kind it is. We have blue-flowered ones and pink-flowered ones climbing the fence, both with the lighter star-shaped centers. The flowers are pretty and I don't mind it on the fence as much as I do the Japanese honeysuckle. We've also got some stuff that looks a little like morning glory that gets tangled up with the plants in the flower beds. I call that "bindweed."
driveway project revisited
Some time back I wrote here that we were removing a wide swath of grass and replacing it with gravel in order to provide more parking space. I am pleased to announce that that project is nearing a successful completion.
Most of the grass was St Augustine although there was a patch of Bermuda mixed in also. First we covered it with plastic and later decided to use a tarp just because it was heavier and stayed in place better. When we pulled it off most of the grass was dead. I mowed as low as I could and then used a garden rake to pull up as much dead stuff as I could. It was surprising how easy it was to get down to bare dirt. The past week I've been shoveling the gravel over the area. I've only been working on that an hour or so a day. Gravel is pretty heavy and for me moving it around is quite a workout in this heat.
Anyone who is a blogger has surely been surprised at times by the web surfers arriving at their site through search engines. I have received more hits on my original entry on the driveway project than any other post I've written. Second is this one on the women war protestors, but that could have been predicted. Most of the ones who arrived at the latter article were probably disappointed but I hope others have found something useful or entertaining here.
zexmenia
If you hear plant people talking about a "sex maniac" in their garden they are probably talking about Zexmenia hispida.
Zexmenia is hardly a maniac though. It is in fact very well-behaved and is quite welcome in our garden. It's a perennial here although I hear it is evergreen further south. It has grown into a bush about 2 feet high and about a yard in diameter. It is supposed to grow in sun or shade but the ones I have planted in the shade have not performed well. Of the two that I have now the one that gets the most sun has the best shape and the most flowers. The other which is in partial shade is larger and somewhat leggy. The flowers are orange-yellow daisies about an inch across. It flowers continuously from May through early Fall.
I was surprised to read in Sally Wasowski's book Native Texas Plants that it is related to horseherb (Calyptocarpus vialis). We have horseherb too but I had never before noticed that it looks like a miniature version of zexmenia. It's only a few inches tall and has the same little yellow flowers only they're only about one-fourth of a inch wide.
Garden Spot
I updated my blogroll with a new site for Garden Spot. It is the first blog I've seen that is using TypePad. Very cool, Erica.
smilax
Every year the back of our property gets a little more wild. Partly this is due to my laziness, but I rationalize it in many ways. We don't really need to use the space ourselves for any other purpose; it provides a haven for birds, insects and other wildlife; it serves as a buffer between us and the property behind us; it's fun to watch what happens there; and I'm sure I could think of more reasons if I tried.
I haven't totally let go of it. I clear up poison ivy and any invasive species I just don't like. I never really thought I would allow greenbrier to grow there either, but this year I decided "why not," as long as it doesn't get too far out of control. The kind we have is Smilax bona-nox, which is the most common type in this area.
I can't say that smilax has a lot of benefits. The fruits are eaten by birds, but that's all I know. I believe it is native to the area and I have always see it in the woods when I go hiking, so it seems natural to me for it to be here.
the cast iron forest
As the traveler proceeded westward across the Blackland Prairie in the nineteenth century he encountered a dense forest of ancient stunted trees. Here is how Washington Irving described what he found in 1832 in A Tour of the Prairies:
I will not easily forget the mortal toil and vexation of flesh and spirit, that we underwent occasionally, in our wanderings through the Cross Timber. It was like struggling through forests of cast iron.
A finger of this forest extends between Dallas and Fort Worth on a sandy soil much different than the black clay I live on a few miles away. Though a modern traveller might not even recognize that he is in a forest so much of it has been cleared and developed, there are fortunately remnants, such as the one in the backyard of Richard Francaviglia, a Professor of History at UTA, and the author of a book I have just finished reading called The Cast Iron Forest.
The trees of the Crosstimbers are a mixture of blackjack and post oak. Although small they are apparently hundreds of years old. There was never a solid forest but a mosaic of forested areas and open prairie. At the same time it was once dense enough to represent a barrier to westward migration.
Growing up in Texas I frequently saw maps with the region marked. I always thought the term defined a geologic formation or a soil type, which it also does, but it never occurred to me that there was a real forest there. Partly that is because the trees are small and partly because so much of it no longer remains. After reading this book I recognize it now along the eastern edge of Fort Worth, where it adds immensely to the beauty of many suburban yards.
The book describes the natural environment of the region and also the role that people have played in transforming it. What amazes me is that a natural feature of the environment that was so important 150 years ago can be virtually unknown to most inhabitants of the region today.
independence weekend
We celebrated the Fourth in traditional fashion. In the morning we walked a couple blocks over to Bluffview where the neighborhood has its own little parade every year. It's a simple affair, mostly just kids on bikes or tricycles, moms pulling kids in wagons and about as many dogs as kids. No motorized vehicles or music. We watched until it passed and then joined in behind.
I was suffering from allergies and didn't want to do anything except vegetate. We ate chili dogs and then went to the movie theater to see Capturing the Friedmans.
A breeze came up at dusk and it started to get pleasant out. We drove downtown and went to the top of the parking garage where Tricia works, where there was a good view of the fireworks show in Trinity Park. It seemed like an original idea to me but there were quite a few others up there, mostly families with kids. We had brought dinner with us and had a picnic while we watched.
Nights like this I usually don't sleep well, because of kids shooting fireworks illegally in the nearby park. Either there weren't any this time or I was too zonked from the allergy medication to notice.
Saturday we drove out of town to visit relatives and the change in the air did me good. We also got some much-needed rain while we were gone.
i was thinking today about ivan
In an earlier life I rented a small duplex in the Montrose section of Houston. My companion during much of this time was a fluffy male cat I called Ivan the Terrible.
My friend Lew left Ivan in my care - permanently, as it turned out - when he set out on another of his long trips. Unfortunately he had liked to tease the kitten by rolling him over on his back and rubbing his stomach, while Ivan tried to bite and kick his hand. A terrible trick to teach a cat, because as it gets stronger the behavior is no longer any fun to anyone and the cat doesn't understand why people get upset when he's trying to play.
We had sidewalks in that neighborhood and Ivan liked to sleep on his back on the one in front of our duplex, where he was a temptation to passersby. I remember one afternoon a stranger rang the doorbell to complain about Ivan's behavior. I offered her a band-aid but it didn't salve her annoyance. I came close to marrying a girl that I met after Ivan hooked her necklace and refused to let go when she stooped over to pet him.
I made a mistake and waited a long time before getting Ivan neutered. As a result he had a lot of tomcat qualities. Not being much of a homebody in those days I just left a window partially open all the time so he could come and go as he pleased. Ivan pretty much ruled that end of our block, chasing off other cats and making himself well-known to many of the humans. When I was home Ivan would follow me around like a dog. At the time I thought that was odd behavior for a cat, although I have since learned better. Actually I can't say that I provided much of a home for him, so the odd thing is that he stuck with me at all.
Ivan went with me when I left Houston to take a job in another city, but he had to become strictly an indoor cat. He didn't adapt well and soon got sick and died.
fennel
Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) is a fun plant to add to your garden. If you are not familiar with it you might be surprised to learn that it gets to be six feet tall.
Personally I happen to enjoy the licorice-like taste of fennel. I even brush my teeth with fennel-flavored toothpaste. So it's convenient to have these seeds right at eye level so I can pick a few and chew on them as I stroll through the garden. A few years ago Tricia made a soup using the bulb which was pretty tasty also.
Black swallowtail caterpillars appear to like them too as the fennel plant never fails to produce a crop of them. I counted five this afternoon.
The seeds are poisonous to many insects which makes fennel handy to keep insects away from a part of your garden where they have been a bother. You can cut up the stems and foliage and spread them as a mulch to keep snails away.
weeding
It's the gardener's responsibility to decide which plants will be permitted to stay in the garden. Those that exhibit bad behavior, the ones that are in the wrong place or are simply too homely must be forced out. Some don't go easily though and it's hard to find tools to get the job done.
I have an especially hard time getting rid of bermuda grass in my flower beds. I dig it out when I am creating new beds, but I have found that bermuda roots go deep and eventually it will show back up. When that happens, I usually take a steak knife that I keep with my tools and cut the roots off as deep in the soil as I can. I use the same tool on hackberry and pecans when I let them get too large to just pull out. The steak knife lets me get down deep with minimal disturbance to the soil and other nearby plants.
Many of my gardener friends are using roundup these days to kill grass and other weeds. I have not had that good of luck with roundup. It seems to take several applications and I have had some bad experiences. I know that it is supposed to only kill the plants with which it comes into direct contact. But despite my best precautions some of my favorite plants have died that were close to where I was spraying weeds.
Another reason I don't like it is that we grow food in our garden. Considering the amount of chemicals that are probably in the food we eat in restaurants or buy in groceries, it is probably silly to try to keep our small garden organic, but we do.
