Plants that Rule: White Mistflower

It has been said before, but White Mistflower rules. It the best plant for attracting swarms of butterflies and other insects. It blooms around the first of November for about 3 or 4 weeks. I swear that mine bloom in the spring as well, but no one believes me. I will pay more attention next spring.
This plant has a slew of names. I learned it as White Mistflower and Eupatorium havanense. Blue Mistflower was called E. greggii. It was a simpler time. Now both have been booted from Eupatorium and into their own genera, Ageratina and Conoclinium respectively. White Mistflower also answers to Shrubby Boneset, Havana Snakeroot, thoroughwort, and probably something else that I can't remember. It's closely related to the plant that causes "milk sickness," A. altissima, a.k.a. White Snakeroot or Tall Boneset. It killed Abe Lincoln's mom. So, don't feed it to your cows and then eat them or drink their milk. You've been warned.

The degree to which White Mistflower attracts insects can't be overstated. They swarm around it like electrons on a nucleus, or rebel ships around the Death Star. All kinds of butterflies, moths, bees, and flies. I've even seen mosquitos feeding on the nectar.
White Mistflower is also rugged. These two plants were originally planted in full sun from a couple of four-inch pots from the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center's Native Plant Sale. I decided one winter that I wanted them elsewhere and dug them up and moved them to a part-shade location. There wasn't much of a rootball and I didn't think they would come back but they did. I didn't really water them much during this year's brutal summer but they didn't care. They just waited until it finally rained and then exploded into bloom.
Oh, and, as you might expect, it smells great. Rich, perfumey, and sweet.

Fall Plant Sale at the Wildflower Center is upon us!

The Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center's Fall Plant Sale and Gardening Festival is this weekend. They will have around 300 species of native plants for sale, so it's your twice a year opportunity to buy plants that you can't get commercially. There is a species list here, and it is truly impressive (316 species, in fact). There are all kinds of native plants I've never heard of, and tons of pictures and descriptions. I've explored this list for an hour just to have some idea of what to expect.

Take this opportunity to become a Wildflower Center member. Admission is free to members, and the best value is to get a buddy to go in on a dual membership at $20 each. That'll get you into the Wildflower Center for free the whole year, so if you plan to visit twice more it saves money. Also, members get 10% off, so you can figure that into the equation. If you go to both the Fall and Spring Sales, you need only spend $35 at each to recoup the cost of membership, considering the $7 admission and member discount. Plus, you get to go to the preview sale, starting at 1pm Friday, and get to hobnob with other members and get first crack at the plants. And, of course, it's great to support such a fine Austin institution.

I plant to get some Snow-on-the-Mountain, Harvard's Agave and who knows what else. See you there!

Welcome to Garden Gnome's Texas Gardening Blog.

My name is Jeff Maxwell and I started Garden Gnome Landscaping in Austin, Texas in the spring 2009, specializing in the design and installation of native landscapes.

Here is my back-story.

I have always been interested in science, particularly biology, but was never much of a student so decided to pursue the goal of 98% completion of a B.A. in English from UT Austin with a 2.5 GPA over the course of a decade or so. That goal achieved, I moved on to other aspirations involving retail jobs and lowly computer tech support positions. Once I was satisfied in those regards, I realized that I had in the meantime become an amateur naturalist and botany hobbyist and determined that this would be my contribution to history: gardening and yammering about it on the Internet.

I have, for most summers of my adult life, had a vegetable garden that was planted with great intentions but with no real knowledge of horticulture and flawed technique, resulting in not a bunch of food. I have learned to vegetable garden by process of elimination. And by reading.

Sometime in the late 1990's, I was going camping (I think at Guadalupe River State Park) and decide that I should know the names of the trees, so I purchased The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Trees Eastern Region. I was able to identify and learn the names of the major trees, like elms and oaks and junipers and the like. This was a lot of fun and made me feel smart.

After this, I noticed plants and appreciated them more and tried to remember their names. I took a great class at UT around 2003 called BIO 406D: Native Plants. It's for non-science majors and focused on the identification of plants and their morphologies and taxonomy. We went on field trips to preserves and parks and really gained an appreciation for the native flora. We learned about 180 plants, their scientific names, jargon for describing them- it was great.

So, I bought some other books and read them and now I feel like I know quite a bit about plants and gardening but there is always someone who knows much more.

These are the canonical books for gardening in Central Texas, or at least the ones I have read, and can recommend:

Texas Gardening the Natural Way: The Complete Handbook by Howard Garrett . This book is comprehensive, detailing what to do and, often overlooked, what not to do in organic gardening. There is an extensive listing of plants, as well as lots of pictures, illustrations, and diagrams. You can open this book to a random page and learn something. I also like that he has his own opinions. I chuckled aloud the first time I read his section of "Worst Trees for Texas" - under Hackberry, his description: "is just a big weed."

Native Texas Plants: Landscaping Region by Region by Sally Wasowski and Andy Wasowski is the most complete, most indispensable guide to native plants. There are about 400 plants described in detail and with a picture of each, as well as well-developed landscape plans for specific botanical regions. That's what great about this book. It divides native plants into regions to describe how to use them best. Now I garden from a Blackland Prairie perspective and everything makes a little more sense.

How to Grow Native Plants of Texas and the Southwest by Jill Nokes is great for anyone who likes to grow plants on the cheap from seed or cuttings, wants plants that are unavailable commercially, or has fantasized about owning a wholesale nursery propagating native plants. I am all three. So if you want to know whether to scarify or stratify seed, or how much rooting hormone to use for your semi-hardwood cuttings, well, you need this book. There is also lots of information on the plants themselves, so it's a very informative read. It's a mostly-words type of book but they did stick in some pretty plates in the middle.

I bought two books for the native plants class I took, Native and Naturalized Woody Plants of Austin and the Texas Hill Country by Brother Daniel Lynch,C.S.C, and Vascular Plant Families, by James Payne Smith, Jr. These are academic books, so they are really expensive new but are cheap used.

Native and Naturalized Woody Plants of Austin and the Texas Hill Country is a carefully illustrated (black and white) guide to trees and shrubs in our area. It's handy and concise, with nice, terse scientific descriptions of local woody flora.

Vascular Plant Families is a text for the true wannabe plant nerd. The first 70 pages are just definitions. My copy was used and pretty much everything was highlighted for the first thirty pages. I figure the previous owner either dropped the class or ran out of highlighter at this point. There are these crazy floral formulas that look like algebra, but are shorthand descriptions of flower descriptions. It helps you learn to recognize the family of a plant you've never seen and it is chock full of wonderful jargon.

So, those are the books I know and like. Anything I say or write can be attributed to them, Central Texas Gardener on KLRU, some plant person, speculation, or is an outright lie.

I plan to update this blog weekly or whenever the fancy strikes. Future topics will include landscapes I've installed, my veggie garden, killing invasives, vermicompost, and plenty of advice and opinion on native plants.