Playin' Outside

San Antonio's Festival of Flowers will resume this Saturday, June 3, 2023, after a break of three years.    I've been given the opportunity to share how I garden, as well as a general overview of our native bees.   A link to a Google doc containing my handout (the info dense slides from my presentation) follows this list of resources.  Note that if you didn't attend, some of the handout pages may not make complete sense.     Hyperlinks to more resources: https://www.wildbeestexas.com/ https://w3.biosci.utexas.edu/jha/research/native-bee-communities https://www.wildflower.org/collections/collection.php?collection=TX_central https://www.pollinator.org/pollinator.org/assets/generalFiles/BeginnerBeeFieldGuide_11March2022_LowRez.pdf https://tpwd.texas.gov/huntwild/wild/wildlife_diversity/nongame/native-pollinators/bumblebee-id.phtml https://www.pollinatorphotos.com/ https://www.homegrownnationalpark.org/       https://drive.google.com/file/d/...

  Here's a link to the story of how a wildlife film maker in Bristol, England, made use of his time during the COVID lockdown, and the discoveries he was able to make in his own yard.  Grab your bowl of popcorn and click here to enjoy!  The sounds are almost as good as the photography. After you've enjoyed that visual feast, you might hop over to Sam Drogge's "Eye Candy" page on flickr .  His bee pictures allow you to get up close and personal with many of our native bees. And if you haven't already heard of Carol Leonardi Clark - as a Texas Master Naturalist, a very active member of the Native Plant Society of Texas, as a Monarch Steward working tirelessly as chairperson to Bring Back the Monarchs to Texas, as a math coach, or as an amazing photographer - well, let me hurry up and make the introduction!  As you can tell from the few of her many "hats" mentioned here, she's an incredible advocate for the natural world, especially here ...

The winter of 2013 affected my four "orchid trees" in different ways, not surprising as they were different varieties originating in very different climates.  Our native variety,  Bauhinia lunarioides , commonly called an Anacacho Orchid, lost tender branches (about 2 to 3 feet of each limb), but has since fully recovered.   The Bauhinia blakeana,  which produced enormous pink blooms that really did look like orchids, died to the ground.   A fourth, Bauhinia fortificata commonly called the Brazilian Orchid tree, also died.  I had high hopes for my favorite,  Bauhinia mexicana , a tiny shrub with delightful split leaves, as it had survived freezes in other years.  But evidently our pattern of freezes alternating with high heat followed again by late season freezes was just too much -  and it too died.  The "native is better" movement may have gained support here.  Even so, we gardeners probably all have our guilty li...