Giving Succor to the Enemy

It started with the plants. Newly arrived in January, trying to acclimate to life, not by the sea, but in a desert, or what I perceived to be a desert, I greeted each new little plant that made a showing on our land with delight and admiration. As winter turned to spring, and a Texas spring seemed to begin in February, more and more unknowns began sprouting up. I was delighted to spot the iconic Blue Bonnet in my own yard, and the reddish rosette ground cover began to shoot up wonderful swathes of purple flowers, Storks bill.

Fabulous! And what is this sweet yellow flower that runs throughout all the others and covers the bare rock? I didn’t know, but by buddying up and growing among the celebrity Blue Bonnets, it would surely be allowed to remain. Ah, but time would prove that that was a foolhardy decision. For what was that sweet yellow flower? A burr of come kind, a burr that would put out thousands of burrs, a burr that would make my dogs life miserable and add 30 minutes of burr-picking time to my day each morning. I was looking for an image of it, and thought it was Sand burr;

the scourge of many a Texas field, but that plant looks even more deadly. These burrs lack the long piercing part, although I have retrieved one of those from my dogs foot. It stopped him in his tracks. Another plant allowed to go its merry way, for a time anyways, out of my slow learning curve, was something, I think, is called Star thistle.

I can’t find it in my books, but I had mowed around it, gave it extra water, expecting some lovely flower to emerge when someone at the nature center pointed it out to me and said, if I had this, I should pull it immediately, bag it, incinerate it, call in a priest etc., etc. And here I had been nurturing the little dear. So each day I went out to hand-pull bags of it. I wear a tennis elbow brace now, thanks to this thistle, but it is mostly gone. I am trying to stay away from herbicides, and there is something satisfying with pulling things out by the roots. Still, it always gives me just a tinge of guilt to realize how judgmental we all can be about who should be coddled and who executed in our yards. But there you have it, if it’s a hindrance to us, out it goes. I DID leave the Texas thistle

along the fence line for I know goldfinch love to both eat the seeds and line their nests with it, and the flower is this wonderful huge violet ball. I wish I had the Musk thistle

in my yard, but I haven’t noticed it yet. HUGE purple flower head, gorgeous. I also make way for the Texas Dandelion, a lovely, pale yellow flower with dark streaks that lines the outside of the stony walkway where the mower can’t reach anyways. And the Stemless Evening Primrose,( “a common lawn invader” the books say- invade away, imagine a saucer of yellow and scatter that all over the lawn)

and the Prairie Verbena, and Winecup

and so many others that were worthy of the succor I gave them. Giving succor to the enemy in the form of letting every hairy, undulating, caterpillar have its way here will also probably prove to have been a mistake. But that requires another blog entirely. Now, I need to get at it: tomatoes to be tied up, (“insta-fruit” seems to be the Texas way, for the garden is growing faster than any other I ever tended), a dog to be walked, birds to be fed, and of course burrs to be picked. Clearly it is a full life here in Texas, fuller, by far, than I ever imagined.