The Joy of Discovery

Every day a new flower. Every day a new butterfly, a new bird song. It is spring in Texas and I am reveling in the joy of discovery. And that, in itself, is an amazing thing. If you are a regular reader of this blog, and you are good at reading between the lines, you must have noticed my mindset when I first arrived in January was one of DOA “Depressed On Arrival”. The reality of leaving the Cape, set in, and I could see nothing good here. The house that I begged to own now looked overwhelming. What was I thinking, 2 acres of land planted in things I knew nothing about! Well, that was the DOA speaking. Now, thank you, thank you God, I see it for what it is, a daily teaching tool on what grows in this limestone, caliche (the clay that is prevalent in the Hill country) environment and I love it!

What started with a scattering of Wind flowers, which made me hesitate to cut the whole yard when I was mowing, has led to a yard that you can barely walk through without stepping on something blooming. These are wildflowers, at least I believe they are, and whether the previous owner scattered seed, or just that bless her, she didn’t use pesticides and they found sanctuary here, I am not sure. My neighbors on either side have cultivated green lawns and they seem so dull by comparison.

I am not sure how to do this without boring you, but here is a partial list of what I have found so far. I will try to include some pictures: clumps of Black Foot daisy
and Prairie Fleabane on the poorest looking of soils, Slender Stem Bitterweed, (a lovely yellow flower on a long stalk with a not so lovely name), everywhere, absolutely everywhere sweet smelling, and this will seem ironic, Wild Garlic and Wild Onion. Also omnipresent, Prairie Verbena as lovely as the Verbena I used to buy and plant on the Cape, here I get it gratis, and in the early morning and late evening, saucer sized yellow Stemless Evening Primroses cover the lower portion of the yard. Sprinkle in some Blue eyed Grass that used to line the banks of the cranberry bog back home, and of course the state flower, Bluebonnets and you simply have a naturalists delight.

The bottom part of the yard really does have rich soil. Years of rain washing away the topsoil from the hill, coupled with the fact that nearby is a creek and perhaps this is an old river bottom, means the growth there is particularly thick, think Sow Thistles with stalks the size of small tree trunks. The ground was covered with thousands of rosettes of what I assumed was a weed, a ground cover or sorts, but just yesterday it began to throw up stalks topped by the most beautiful purple flower. It is called Storks Bill for when it stops blooming it will send out this long, spike of a seed reminiscent of, dah, a storks bill! How cool is that! And from the profusion of them I shall soon have swaths of purple down there. And on top of all that, this yard of hidden nectar, means I have a parade of butterflies flitting about constantly. You will surely hear about them in the future.

But isn’t life amazing. Here I was bereft, thinking a Cape Cod naturalist would be worth a bucket of spit in Texas, but now I have wonderful places to volunteer, and a daily delightful chore of researching all that grows around me. I love a song by Sarah Grove, embarrassingly I am not even sure of the title, but it had been a theme song of mine for the last year. It covered the feeling of depression, but also covered the sense of hope, that God saw something else that I couldn’t see and how true that has turned out to be.

“From this one place I can’t see very far. From this one place I’m square in the dark (my DOA days) But this one thing I know in my heart. You can see something else, you can see, you can see, you can see something else.” And so He did. From that heavenly three months in the cottage in on the lake in Falmouth, to this yard that, at the moment, is blooming like a little Eden, He saw something else. And at the risk of being ridiculously repetitive, how I thank Him! And by the look of unopened buds on unnamed plants, there is so much more to come. Bloom on dear flowers, bloom on!