Herself's Houseplants

• Rabbit?s Foot Fern ( Davallia fejeensis )

  This easy to grow fern loves shade and doesn’t mind if you forget to water it occasionally. It also will tolerate cold down to freezing occasionally.  The fronts will grow 1′ to 2′ long indoors if it is happy.  It will fill much thicker as it ages so there will be no space between [...]

• Stressed plants make own asprin

  Not only do stressed trees make their own aspirin to help protect themselves, they release methyl salicylate into the environment to warn other plants. I told you those plants were all talking about you. It has also been verified that plants in laboratories under stress also produce asprin, which means your houseplants are likely doing [...]

• Big Thicket National Preserve Carnivorous Plant Photos

  Big Thicket Nat’l Preserve has a large section of carnivorous plants growing. There are several trails you can take along wooden walkways through the swamps to view them. March and April are best if you want to see them flowering.

Herself's Houston Garden

• Thrips

  Thrips are so tiny you’ll need a magnifying glass to see them.  They average about 1/25″ long. Color is anywhere from yellow to black.  Males are wingless, females have four wings that are fringed.  Adult females do not need males to reproduce.  They appear only in very large groups, there’s never just a few of [...]

• Rebuilding the butterfly garden

  The butterfly garden took the worst hit of all the beds not flattened by trees during Ike. Most of the plants local butterflies love are woody flowering shrubs. The wind tore off their leaves, and broke their branches. I cut most of them back to almost ground level. Some are slowly leafing back [...]

• Golden silk spiders

  Yellow silk spiders ( aka banana spiders ) appear down here in August through September. I’ve never seen one out of season but they are every where there is woods late summer. The spider is harmless, you have to seriously antagonize this spider to get bit and the bite is not as bad as a [...]

Birds of southeast Texas in photos

• American Brown pelican

  Photos from Corpus Christi, TX and South Padre Island, TX

• Pileated woodpecker

  front yard photos, The Woodlands, TX

• Purple gallinule

  Photo taken in Brazo’s Bend State Park