Easssssst-Side-Patch finally has a sssnake?


Whoa! an urban snake!

I was on my way down the yard to challenge William Wallace to our usual weekend stone throwing competition (he prides himself on his accuracy).  After a brief conversation with him about the English, I turned around to see this snake, stretched out across the path! I realized I must have stepped right over it without seeing it. At this point I realized that to get across the snake I would have to jump back over it. I was flanked left and right by my pampas grasses, and venturing anywhere close to them would have been as bad as a snake bite. This was the largest snake I have witnessed in my yard, and my jump across it must have looked hilarious, so exaggerated!

Purple Heart sprawling inbetween some moss boulders.
The blooms look like they are riding in dugout canoes.


Another (almost) bloomer right now, Meyer Lemon, I have just moved my container
up onto my porch for a little extra protection over the winter.
It is always a trade-off,  heat verses light.

All my ornamental grasses are now putting on their brown winter clothes to match the granite pathways and moss boulders. They will stay like this until I see new growth appearing in early spring.


This philippine violet bloom has long lost it’s color, but has taken on
a completely new rustic aesthetic

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

My sentiments exactly!

I am tired of the dry, dusty air and weather we have endured this year.
Here in the ESP we have continuously been boiling pans of water and pushing our humidifier to its limit. We are into the tail-end of November for crying out loud, and my loquats look like they did mid summer!  The ground is still so dry, and I am officially tired of bright sunny days. (Apologies to the folks in the northern territories!)

“Clouds, I demand clouds, lots of them…and they will be dark
and full of rain, or my name is not Gaius Iulius Caesar.
This is mywill”.

The sunny days have been good for satumthing though…

This satsuma tree is still very young, 4 years, and about 5ft tall.
One of the distinguishing features of the satsuma is the distinctive thin, leathery skin dotted with large and prominent oil glands.

Yes, the one and only fruit my satsuma orange tree managed to squeeze out. Last year we had four of these orange chaps on this tree, but all of them had as much moisture in them as my soil does right now. They were woody, juice-less, dry, and it’s fruit flavor finished on a distinctively ”un-sweet” note…disgusting.

I anticipated the same fate this year for my rogue, lone orange. I picked it today and ceremoniously place it on a sacrificial moss stone. We all anxiously gathered around it expecting the worse. Like last years offering, it looked amazing, super bright orange and flawless. I glanced at everybody one by one with the mad expression “Chairman Kaga ” on Iron Chief usually reserves to highlight the shows “theme ingredient”.

“Allez Cuisine!” (begin cooking) in French. so far so good!
(So that is what that means!)

When I peeled a section of it I noticed that the flesh on the segments was soft…could it be?
There was a silence in the group.
I peeled away a segment and squeezed it, yes definitely some form of moisture / liquid in there…could it be?

“Citrus analysis Spock”? ……       “The segment does appear to have a high concentration of moisture captain”.

I handed the segment to my wife – what?  Did you think I was going to be the sampler after last years abominations? … Oh no, not this time. All eyes looked on as she tentatively bit into it. She slowly started nodding, a smile crossed here face, “It is good, it is really good”! At this point, there was a collective sigh and we all started cheering, the scene began to resemble an end scene from a Walton’s Mountain episode!


“Look Ma, ESP has finally produced an edible satsuma!”
“HaHa, well that he has John Boy, but it is going to be a rather small
pot of marmalade”
Haaaaaa  Haaaaaaa  Haaaaaaaa … Aww Ma!!!!


Damned Waltons!
“IT IS YOUR FERTILE VIRGINIA SOIL!”

Anyway, we all enjoyed it, and I look forward to the sapling maturing into a tree, perhaps if I get lucky, like this one, amazing. Is that sand?

Staying on citrus for one moment…is anyone else having a cucumber beetle rampage going on in their yards right now. I have so many, mostly centered around my two citrus trees and my plethora of amaranth plants. I shook the Mexican Lime tree and a cloud of them took to the air. I tried to get a shot  of these to show you the biblical extent of this infestation, without much luck.

Look at them all! Even in their large numbers I haven’t really seen too much plant damage. Here is another one on a Miscanthus seed head. I am hoping that a freeze will take care of them. If we ever get a freeze.

Every time I have walked by my terracotta and asparagus fern ampitheater recently,  I have heard tiny little
voices… little sounds like “one, two, check”.
Imagine my surprise when I went out later tonight only to find a full on concert beginning in my back yard! I leaned down and quietly asked the performers who they were, (for fear of blowing over their enormous tiny amp array),  they squeaked back in irritated tiny voices:
“The Ferns”, (like I should already know)!
I asked them to try to avoid excessive foot traffic by my recently planted artemesia, as there was rather a large crowd gathering for the gig! They squeaked back, “hey Mr square, this is rock and roll man, chill Winston”!
I walked away feeling quite old.

The day after the concert I noticed this sad canna lily scene. I can only assume that this was the work of a rogue cigarette flicked into the plant, after the show… so annoying! I went back to the ampitheater to complain, but everyone was gone, and the equipment was all disassembled. All that remained of the shindig was a few tiny beer cans scattered aound the asparagus ferns. That is the last time I will ever let an inch high, pretentious rock star, push me into holding a gig back there, it simply is not worth it.

I have to post one more shot of this amazing swallowtail butterfly and a close up of a couple of it’s eggs. The “eye” eggs make this mexican lime leaf look very comical.

All of my succulents in my small circular bed are now taking on a hues of various degrees of purple as the winter approaches. I have made a decision that my middle “moonscape” bed will be filled with a diversity of these next year, rather than lavender.

The leaves and blooms on my donkey ears have also turned a crimson blush, I hope this will bloom before a hard frost hits it.

Here is the future succulent bed.

I need to start to learn the names of all of these plants as I am adopting them more and more. I love the miniature scale and form that this genre of plants afford, there is always something unexpected going on. The plants are quick to mutate into color changes, flowers, and unexpected growth forms / reproductive habits. I am thinking lava rocks, succulents, undulating terrain and a tumbled glass mulch top dressing.

My  lavender plants are doing well in containers for the
time being, and it is here they will remain for the near future.

Exploding papyrus heads set against a dusk wintry sky…Brrr.

Rootbeer plant (Piper auritum)                                                    Flower stalk

While my rootbeer plants flower every year without fail, it seems they have trouble producing fruit in our climate. The flower stalk is a plain white stem, 4 – 6 inches long, that grows upright above the leaves. This is covered with tiny, tiny little flowers that are difficult to see. ( I did notice a lot of people at the concert were wearing them in their lapels) After the flowers are fertilized, the stem drops down and round fruits form, looking something like grapes on a stick. I’ve never seen any fruits on plants in Austin, has anyone else?. Perhaps the flowers are not getting fertilized.
In favorable climates the flowers are followed by a single-seeded fruit, a drupe. The seeds are dispersed by frugivorous (fruit-eating) bats.

“See you next time”!
“Happy Thanksgiving”

Stay tuned for:
“Snakes and Ladders”

All material © 2008 for east_side_patch. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

“Ya, but no, but ya,
but, ooooooo my god I cannot believe ESP
has changed his blog layout, or summat, or nothin”!

Times are changing for this large pecan tree also, expedited by the recent cold snap. The browning foliage looks spectacular right now against the blue sky days we are experiencing. I am still watering as if it is summer, the ground is still so dry, and there is still no rain in sight!

I have been taking advantage of this cooler weather by doing things in the yard that I had postponed in the Hell days of summer. The most disturbing of these was the shed “clean” up. I dont know if you remember
this?:

“A Nutria is Eating my Shed”

This summer I was a late setting some poison out, and one “Ratatouille” turned into quite a few. I fixed the vent where they were getting in, and a couple of them “passed away” inside the shed. Needless to say I avoided going into the shed as much as possible. The combination of 100 degree temps (120 inside the shed) and a decomposing rat or two is a disastrous combination beyond belief. I felt like I should tape up

the entire shed with police tape, that, or just set fire to the whole thing. My theory here was to let them “dry up” as it were, and dry up they did.  The aroma went from a mind altering:

to a “what is that?, can you smell that?, oh yes now I remember”.

The recent bulk collection prompted my venture back inside the shed for a deep clean up. I will not go into details here, but lets just say there were moments of retching in between scrubbing, scraping and disinfecting, and some scrubbing, scraping and disinfecting in between retching. I got rid of so much clutter, sterilized everything, and now look at it:

Ahhh! order is restored again, and what is that, some empty shelf space? unheard of.
I  learned a gruesome lesson here, one I never want to repeat…ever.


Now here is another tragic tale, I mean wing.
I found this dismembered Swallowtail wing on my pathway.
Perhaps this predator was the perpetrator:?

The “Jaws” ahem, of an agave beginning to open. The blood stained teeth, color and skin texture look like a great white.

“Everyone out! Get out  now! Out of the cactus bed”.

Here is a happier Swallowtail with two wings, I caught this one on my satsuma orange tree,

The colors and markings are staggering, it looks like cathedral organ pipes, or a stained glass window.

Here she is in her finest angelic glory, busy laying eggs in the citrus. If you look closely at the top picture, is that an egg? You can see a couple more eggs on the image on the right. I never realized Swallowtail eggs were that big.
Here is the young tree’s only fruit of the year.

The bark on this tree is also interesting.

On a furrier note
As close as I can tell this is a true brushfoot:
Painted Lady Vanessa cardui

I caught this one loitering on the last of my coneflowers heads.

…and one final bird:
Brown Longtail Urbanus procne ?


This was the closest ID I could come up with-A fighter jet of the moth world.

the wing structure looks different though. Any ideas?I snapped a few images of this guy (whoever he is) all around
the garden in the last couple of weeks.

Copper Canyon Daisy Tagetes Lemmonii, a great companion
plant to other fall bloomers such as Mexican Bush Sage and
Fall Aster. Always a dependable bloomer, I like the way the blooms contrast my containered burgundy Canna Lilly.

Fuzzy Mexican Bush Sage and a large (very busy) bumble.

Feeding time!
Something has been feeding on my water lilies. Look at them!
Does anyone have any ideas?, we do have water snails
(that we did not introduce).

Seed head on a Damianita Chrysactinia Mexicana.


Amaranth seed head, a prolific self-seeder.


And to wrap-up, the other-worldly forms of a “baby toes” succulent.

Stay Tuned for:
“Dry as a Bone”

All material © 2008 for east_side_patch. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

It is official, there is now one more little person staggering blindly around in the patch, (and no, it is not me after one too many frothing ales). My youngest finally found his feet this last week and is now swaggering down decomposed granite pathways like an inebriated pirate, making equally as much sense.

Oh, here comes trouble!

“Jack Sparrow’s the name, me thinks you need to stop with the drunk
pirate stereotypes…savvy?”
“Whats that plant over there, is that echinacea? I needs some of that to cure the curse on the Black Pearl.”


“Echinacea?
Me thinks you will need something a little stronger to cure me”! mmm…calamari


Amazing new blooms in November! This is the only one that has recently grown and bloomed at such an eleventh hour in the year. I am not complaining. The colors in this seed head are amazing, like red-hot pokers.  All of my other coneflowers all have blackened seed heads by now, busy reseeding for next year.

Fibre optic seed heads.


Coneflower Echinacea purpurea. On a cooler note:


Can you guess what this is a picture of ?
A satellite image of algae ponds in Indonesia perhaps? (right photo courtesy of Farl, a great photography blog)
http://colloidfarl.blogspot.com/ check it out.No, you guessed it…

Hoja Santa.


Here is a before and six-month later shot of my circular “Microcosmic” garden. I really have enjoyed tracking the progression of this bed over the last half year.  I am so intrigued with this planting that I am leaning away from planting lavender in my new middle bed, and may continue this on a larger scale. There is always something new to observe in here, the plants have reproduced prolifically over the last couple of months. My plan is to wait and see what makes it through the winter and base my decision on this.

Echinacea was used by Native American tribes as a tonic and antiseptic and proved effective in treating snakebites and infections. Otherwise known as Coneflower or Sampson Root, Echinacea came to widespread prominence in the late 1800s when it was marketed in a popular elixir called “Meyers Blood Purifier”.
It’s now a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry.

The plants really filled in quite fast and the mexican feather grass worked out a treat to soften the transition into the granite pathway. The burnt orange mexican gazing ball is enough to warm up the scene. See the donkey ear (Kalanchoe gastonis-bonnieri) central? …


Well it has sent up this amazing geometric candleabra, it really looks like I have stuck it in the ground, it looks totally fake.

and this is a detail of the flower heads that I am waiting to open. It would be really odd to walk out and see small candle flames burning, just as one last…”ah ha! you didn’t expect that did you camera boy”. This plant has been prolific this year. I must have propagated 20 babies, dotting them all around my back yard. They were so resilient, I began experimenting with planting places I thought they would not survive!


A patch of transplanted donkeys. “They look nothing like my ears”

“Tap of the mornin’ to ya”
In the same circular bed I caught these two rosettes looking like
an exotic bra advertisment for St Patrick’s day. You can see that right?
The clover? The rosettes? No?

And one more shot. Does anyone know where I can get some more,
perhaps a little larger lava rocks from in Austin?

Last succulent image I promise. I decided to plant under the giant timber bamboo that pushed through some of my brickwork earlier this year.

“whirling butterfly” Gaura with
an ornamental cabbage back-drop,
a great combination of colors and forms.

Now onto some insects…

This flowering loquat attracted a multitude of insects this past week, everything from monarchs to honeybees to…


Whatever this is? any thoughts?  The pattern on this UT fan is amazing.


This was probably the most skittish of all the damsels I have tried to photograph. I spent about 20 minutes to just get these two shots. Again an ID would be greatly appreciated. This variety has a very tiny body compared to the ones I have captured on earlier posts… the tank turret at the end of it’s tail, what is that all about?
click on the image (actually any of my images), then click on it again for a super close up!

“Venture into my forest would ye!
It amazes me what fantasy worlds exist under the most unassuming of garden shrubs. This scene looks like an evil forest from a fairy tale.

From a prehistoric insect to a prehistoric landscape under a prostrate rosemary bush.

Purple fountain grass seed heads with bamboo muhly in the background, both respond well to the softest of breezes…talking of plants and breezes… Everybody into plants will have a new respect for their abilities after watching the movie by M. Night Shyamalan. (now out on DVD).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BRZ0u01KwQ


The slightest breeze gets my attention
after watching this movie.

Purples in the front yard. Mexican bush
sage against our front steps, always
puts on a great fall display.

Crazy amaranth seed heads…heat -
seeking missiles.

A wild sea-oat seedhead shadowed behind the back lit leaf of a canna lily.

Tattoo on an agave leaf - an imprint from when it unfurled.

It is amazing how unassuming the pre-blooms are on this red passion vine. Who would suspect that they turn into the most amazing of flowers. This vine has produced more flowers this year then any other, it is like the hotter and dryer the conditions, the better it does, a good combination for Texas.


One more red to end, mexican fire bush pods.

Stayed tuned for:
“Dead in a Shed”

All material © 2008 for east_side_patch. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.