Coneflowers are blooming their happy looking heads off in the Patch right now…

They are like strange alien palm trees stretching their other-worldly rocket silhouettes up into the martian sky.

Echinacea has to be one of the most cheerful blooms…

and as an unexpected surprise, the waning olive / orange hues of the seed-heads blend well with the new paint color on our house, courtesy of the infamous Chevy Tahoe.

Talking of purple-orange things:

I caught this Pipevine Swallowtail larvae

Battus philenor

moving at full steam across the decomposed granite in my front garden, and was it moving fast.  It paused briefly to allow me to get these shots in, before it was off again.

Both the caterpillars and the adults are very conspicuous, promoting their protection of noxious chemicals that they obtain from the poisonous plants on which they feed, specifically pipevine plants in the genus Aristolochia.

Pipevine Swallowtail adults are black and the males have an amazing electroluminescent blue sheen to their hind wings. Females sometimes have a hint of the blue but are mostly black. The undersides of the hind wings are decorated with white and orange spots. When they feed, Pipevine Swallowtails rarely stop fluttering, making it hard to get a good look at them, and a decent picture.

Okay, one final purple… and one of my unruly favorite plants is wafting its incredible Gothic scent all over the Patch right now…Evergreen Wisteria:

Millettia reticulata

I say unruly, as this plant requires a significant amount of space and support and pruning.  I have three of these plants in the Patch and they all boom a slightly different times, lucky for me.  This one always is the early bloomer, sprawling over trellises that I have positioned behind my bench.

The aroma sitting on this bench right now is amazing, reminding me of dank, patchouli infused, London Gothic night clubs that I used to frequent as a vampire in another life.

On the vegetable front:

After transplanting last weeks tobacco hornworms my tomatoes continue to produce in large numbers…

Although the pest onslaught has continued…

“Were getting close lads…1st platoon, on my order…”

One of my eggplants also had some rather unsavory visitors:

The bottom fruit of this eggplant had pushed itself into the soil on the inside of the stock-tank, on prizing it to the outside of the tank, I immediately noticed that something was horribly wrong:

Eww, Eww, and more Eww!

“Why you little…”

My tomatillo plants on the other hand are bug free and going completely bananas…I have never grown these peppers before, and I had no idea these plants would get this large.

Pole beans are finally ascending well, after a slow start, with the recent showers and rains we have had in Central Texas.

Finally:

Pride of Barbados is breaking into bloom.  One of my favorite foliage plants.

My Datura silk handkerchiefs have now turned into these droopy, umbrella-canopied seed pods.

In an adjacent loquat, I captured this…

…a silver-spotted skipper, another first in the Patch, and check out that white paint spill!  The war-paint looks like it has been painted on.

Epargyreus clarus

This is a large dark brown butterfly with long pointed forewings and white patches on the undersides of the hind wings, and orange patches on the forewings. This skipper rarely sits with wings completely open. More often they are held together or just slightly separated just like this one.

“Ach! I prefer the white and tan, ah knew the blue was a buug mistake!”

Stay Tuned for:

“Animal House”

All material © 2010 for eastsidepatch. Unauthorized
intergalactic reproduction strictly prohibited, and
punishable by late  (and extremely unpleasant)
14th century planet Earth techniques.

I wish I was, with the onset of our hot weather comes thoughts of coastal breezes…knotted handkerchiefs (have to be British)….

beaches, jerk chicken, huge fires, hammocks..zzz…ZAP!..My thoughts were quickly interrupted as a particularly aggressive mosquito took a pound of flesh from the inside of my ankle, always in the same place…the predominant capillary, no, I was most definitely still in central Texas.  On noticing that both ankles were covered in the blood sucking needles, I immediately went into a slapping frenzy… causing my poorly tied, (yet satisfyingly comforting), iced “urban” turban to fall onto the ground. I then began turning around, apparently to face my enemy?

There was no real reason to turn around at all, it was as though there might have been a huge mosquito sneaking up on me from behind, I just had to make sure… arrgh the scratching…the spittle, the itch, the scratching, the…

“What IS he doing big sis? Look….whats h’  doin’?”

“It appears he is performing some type of tribal dance, now where were we, ah yes, I was winning at Quidditch…”

Back on the sanctity of higher ground and with our industrial fan aimed directly at our ankles, we decided to engage in an activity that can keep my elder hobbit quiet for at least an hour and a half (pretty impressive)…shelling stuff, she loves it!  This time the shelling was to extract a pile of bluebonnet seeds that were kindly given to us by Rock Rose http://wwwrockrose.blogspot.com/ at the last GG get-together and plant swap.  Wow!…Did these small seedpods keep us busy.  It took an awful lot of shelling to even cover the bottom of the container we were putting them in. We continued to shell and shell, then we started to sing and shell…“She’ll be shelling all the seedpods when she comes, she’ll be shelling all the seedp”…etc,etc…What the shell?

Then we entered a quiet period which had a sort of resigned “this is going to take us hours” undertone…but we persevered…we prevailed, and with the lash of the whip and quite a lot of moaning toward the end (mostly from me) we had emptied every single seed into the pot. I had even worn a groove in my thumbnail!

My youngest kept running his fingers through the seeds in a sinister Fagin-like fashion, needless to say,  I was keeping my eye closely on him and his fiendish grin.  If these seeds were prematurely ejected out of their container, after all we had been through, they might not be the only thing to go flying off the back deck!  (A whole new ESP interpretation of the game :  Quidditch)!

The seeds look like pebbles on Brighton beach!

‘Go and get me a tub of pickled whelks George, be a love”!

Now if these chaps washed up onto the beach, there would be total mayhem!

The total count of my dragonfly larvae is now up to six in my small stock tank, all eerily bobbing around like low-budget special effects props.

Moving quickly on…

My Vitex tree has formed this dark tunnel, leading all the way back to my really attractive metal chain-link fence…(we used to have two old springer spaniels roaming around the Patch).

it adds just enough privacy from our front porch swing-seat to the sidewalk.

My hell-strip opuntia, yucca and  sago, warming up to our now summer like temperatures.

As the day star warms up in Texas, artemesia and purple verbena help to cool things back down.

The day star has its uses though.  My tomatoes are doing well this year (famous last words).

Also in the tomato family, though you most certainly want to steer clear away from eating any part of this one…

Datura getting ready to pop open up one of its lethal white linen napkins…don’t be wiping your gravy face with this, unless you want to end up acting ‘a wee bit strange’ like the platoon members at the end of this post!

Datura wrightii

Do not be fooled by the waxy icing-sugary beauty of this plant…Datura belongs to the classic “witches’ weeds,” along with deadly nightshade, henbane and mandrake. Most parts of these plants contain toxic hallucinogens, Datura has a long history of use for causing delirious states and death. It was well known as an essential ingredient of love potions and witches’ brews. The leaves,stem,root and fruits of datura contain a battery of tropane alkaloids, the most potent of which are atropine, hyoscyamine and scopolamine.  One autonomic response of atropine is the dilation of pupils, once considered to be a beautiful and mysterious look in Italian women. The word Belladonna or “beautiful lady” came about because sap from the closely related belladonna plant (Atropa belladonna) was used as eye drops to dilate the pupils. Today, doctors rarely perform any type of eye surgery without using atropine, one of the poisons in deadly nightshade, to dilate the patient’s pupils.

The large, trumpet-shaped flowers on the plant are sometimes tinged with purple like this one, and resemble huge morning glory blooms. It is one of the largest and most striking of all native wildflowers.

Datura can also be used to induce hallucinations, the plant can induce auditory and visual hallucinations, however, the hallucinations are sometimes fatal due to panic that overcomes the person.

Scopolamine in the plant takes away a person’s vision, (can’t be good).  As the person panics and attempts to run to safety, the person cannot see and frequently becomes involved in an accident and ends up in the hospital, which surprisingly is not such a good place to end up for a datura ingester. Why is that you ask?

Well, scopolamine induces respiratory depression at hallucinogenic doses, and the combination of anesthesia (administered in the hospital) and Datura is usually fatal due to combined respiratory depression.

Scopolamine was also one of the active principles in many of the “flying ointments” used by witches, sorcerers and fellow travelers of many countries and cultures from millennia ago ostensibly down to the late 19th century or even to the present day. Scopolamine and related tropanes contributed both to the flying sensations and hallucinations sought by users of these compounds.

Datura has been a popular poison for suicide and murder. From 1950–1965, the State Chemical Laboratories in Agra, India investigated 2,778 deaths that were caused by ingesting Datura.

Common names for the plant include Thorn Apple (from the spiny fruit), Pricklyburr, Jimson Weed, Moonflower, Hell’s Bells, Devil’s Weed, Devil’s Cucumber, and Devil’s Trumpet.

During mid and late summer the white, fragrant blossoms are frequently visited by large nocturnal hawk moths.  They are sometimes called sphinx moths because the alarm posture of the larva resembles the Egyptian sphinx.

I will finish with this humorous eye-witness account of the effects of datura:

“The James-Town Weed (which resembles the Thorny Apple of Peru, and I take to be the plant so call’d) is supposed to be one of the greatest coolers in the world. This being an early plant, was gather’d very young for a boil’d salad, by some of the soldiers sent thither to quell the rebellion of Bacon (1676); and some of them ate plentifully of it, the effect of which was a very pleasant comedy, for they turned natural fools upon it for several days: one would blow up a feather in the air; another would dart straws at it with much fury; and another, stark naked, was sitting up in a corner like a monkey, grinning and making mows (grimaces) at them; a fourth would fondly kiss and paw his companions, and sneer in their faces with a countenance more antic than any in a Dutch droll.

In this frantic condition they were confined, lest they should, in their folly, destroy themselves — though it was observed that all their actions were full of innocence and good nature. Indeed, they were not very cleanly; for they would have wallowed in their own excrements, if they had not been prevented. A thousand such simple tricks they played, and after eleven days returned themselves again, not remembering anything that had passed”. – The History and Present State of Virginia, 1705

Finally:

My milk weed thistle is finally going to seed, and quite impressive they are.

There are a bunch of these seeds around the base of the plant, waiting for a gust of wind to send them on their next journey.

“Oh come on”!

Our Patch cabin has been full of pictures the past week that are now on display in Crimson Hair and Skin: 806 West Ave.

If you are downtown Austin please feel free to pop in and take a look.

Image of the week:

A typical night collecting moths at Pena Blanca, Santa Cruz County Arizona (18 July 2000). Photo by Howard Byrne.

I must try this in the Patch!

Stay Tuned for:

“Carry on up the Nile”

All material © 2010 for eastsidepatch. Unauthorized
intergalactic reproduction strictly prohibited, and
punishable by late  (and extremely unpleasant)
14th century planet Earth techniques.

DISCLAIMER: Some of the plants discussed in this article contain very poisonous alkaloids which can be lethal if ingested in sufficient quantities. Native people, witches, and all manner of little goblin folk developed time-tested religious rituals using these plants that were passed down through countless generations.

Never try this unless supervised by an adult.

This tale starts out of greed, greed for the largest wind chimes I could afford and struggle home with. It is funny, chimes sound very soothing with the wind blowing through them, but as soon as you try to pick them up and carry them they turn into the chimes from Hell, clanking nonsense. There I was in The Great Outdoors nursery in Austin, eying-up some monster chimes. Like a complete nerd I had to try each one to find the one with ”just the right notes and tonality”.  (You immediately forget what the previous set sounds like).  Back and forth I went like an obsessed percussionist, to the dismay of the nursery’s staff. I settled on the “set for me”, large, but not too large, a deep zen sound with a slight dis-chord . . . perfect, I clanked my way to my truck, and settled them down with a blood curdling sound (metal on metal) and rushed home to hoist them to their new home in the trees.

The first inclination that this was going to be slightly tasking was when I had gathered the “mad octopus” clinking in one of my arms and started to head up my stepladder, which incidentally kept sinking into a bed of mulch. The gravity of my predicament started with the sudden awareness that the chimes were extremely heavy. I then realized that I had to go up very high on my stepladder to get the chimes to a tree limb high enough so that I wouldn’t be continuously hitting my head when walking underneath them. After 45 minutes of struggling in the heat with my “mad octopus” my new chimes were “up” in the Pecan tree next to my back deck. When I say “up” I actually meant that I had managed to get them about 6ft off the ground. “I will just duck if I need to go by them,” I convinced myself.  I went to my outside refrigerator and grabbed a cold Corona, sat down, put my feet on a low table, and nursed the bruises on my head whilst waiting patiently for a breeze. About three days later, a breeze finally did blow in. The “deep zen sound with a slight dis-chord” was suddenly transformed into something loud enough to raise the dead, no, Nooo, NOOOO!

Word of warning:  just because something is new – doesn’t mean you should position it close to you so you can see it or hear it!

I realized this was not yet over, I looked over with dread to my stepladder, then down to my Post Oak at the end of my yard.

The chimes in their new home – they now sound just like I wanted them to. The deep bass sounds contrast with
a number of small, higher pitched wood and metal chimes surrounding the back deck. I now appreciate what
it takes to create a balance of sounds at various distances and pitches, the sign of a truly acoustic nerd!

Other Interesting things in the yard right now:


Burgundy Canna light show and the cool purples of Verbena in full bloom


Datura (Jimsonweed) caught early morning. Dies to the ground in winter but returns each spring.


Night opening flowers get to 4-6″ wide.

” I told you we should have got a room in the four seasons, Gladdis”

Stay Tuned for:

“The Pampas Chainsaw Massacre”

All material © 2009 for eastsidepatch. Unauthorized
intergalactic reproduction strictly prohibited, and
punishable by  late  (and extremely unpleasant)
14th century planet Earth techniques.