The 100 Species Challenge

Scarlet Globemallow/Yerba de la Negrita

2012-01-09T14:54:00.001-08:00

Scarlet Globemallow / Yerba de la Negrita

These grow over three feet high each year, in a couple of places in the yard. I'll take a photo next year.

It's winter, and nothing is so exciting as that sea onion

2009-11-25T17:53:00.000-08:00

You can click to enlarge.

October 29, 2009, Sea Onion at it again

2009-10-29T13:02:00.000-07:00

To the left of this, at the bottom right of the photo, is the first flower of this set of blooms of the False Sea Onion.

I lowered the hanging pot so it will have more room to do what it wants to do Last time it hit the ceiling early on. Going by what it did last summer, I figure what shows in this photo will stretch out to be about three feet long with a bloom a day or more, but always stretching outward and losing the old blooms.

Today would've been my mom's birthday. She would have been 77 years old. She liked plants. Now I like plants. She's dead. Someday I will be too.

I have some ivy that connects me to my mom, but I don't know the name of it. I've never seen any just like it anywhere else. If anyone here can identify it that would be awesome.

#X2 Not from around here

2009-10-20T17:41:00.000-07:00

This is Holly, with a picture-phone report from a find where she's living in Oregon. It's not very nice, this thing she found.

Previously in the X-rated plant category...

#35 Honey Locust

2009-10-18T19:47:00.001-07:00

Seven or eight years ago, I was at a homeschooling get-together at a park, and while I was talking to Dave Martinez, I was gathering seeds, just for something to do. I knew what the seeds were. When I was a kid, in elementary school, there were honey locust trees in the SE corner of the school yard, and that was a great place to play, when I was in 5th grade, and 6th. That's where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated. When the bell rang and we went to the nearest stairs to line up to go in after lunch, the teachers had tears in their eyes.

In the spring we would take the beans off that tree, split them lengthwise, and pull out a part that was between the kernel and the hull. They were clear and a little gummy, and shaped like pretty fingernails. We would stick them on our fingernails. They didn't stay long, but it was fun to imagine we had beautiful long fingernails. I don't have a photo of that, but will try to arrange to have a little girl model next year.

In fall, the seeds we couldn't reach would fall, and they made a great noise inside the pod, and we'd break them out and play with them.

I took those seeds home and planted them. I have trees nearly as tall as the house. Here's a fall photo, taken today:

Here's one from summer a year ago:

The close tree is the honey locust. Here's how it looked against the sky:

Honey locusts aren't high-class trees. They have thorns. They make more mess than shade. But for me they provide good memories of times spent playing when I was ten and eleven. I remember sitting under one of those trees and talking to my friend Martha about my parents planning to vote for Johnson. Her dad was going to vote for Goldwater. We knew it was somehow important that Kennedy had died and the next two candidates were from Texas and Arizona. Things were not going to stay in the northeast anymore. (And from New Mexico's point of view, Illinois and Ohio are quite-a-ways east.)

The first year I taught, I was in a portable building in the same place where those honey locusts had been ten years before. It seemed like longer.

Wikipedia says the wood of the honey locust polishes really well, and that posts made of it don't rot very quickly. So if we get tired of these, Keith can make something out of them!

#34 Agapanthus / Lily of the Nile

2009-10-18T19:00:00.001-07:00

I bought one of these at Lowe's for $30, a pot-bound bunch. "Peter Pan Lily of the Nile," it said. It took the whole passenger side of the car—pot in the floor, and flowers everywhere. I took it out and looked at it and loved it. I planted it and loved it more.

I went back to the store to get more. There were three. I bought two of them, but they wouldn't fit in the car so I pushed the cart home (three blocks). Here's a photo of the cart full of flowers!

Here's the first one I got, though, in the front yard:

When I was in Surrey, in the U.K., at Julie Daniel's house, they had one in their back yard. There were more near the Thames, near the Spelthorne library and museum.

I have gathered seeds, to see if I can start any that way, and I suppose they will divide under the ground where they are, if they survive the winter.

They're not naturally local, but if mine do well and I share with friends, someday they'll be "natural" in a way.

#33 False Sea Onion

2009-07-27T14:42:00.000-07:00

This isn't native and it's not outside, but it's blooming, and I'm in England and missing it.

Luckily Holly is home and has a great camera and sent me these:

Time passed:

In October I separated and re-potted what was in that pot, and within days the main/original plant was starting to bloom again.

October 6:

October 18:

other images of that plant:
http://sandradodd.blogspot.com/2009/07/meanwhile-back-in-new-mexico.html
http://sandradodd.blogspot.com/2009/12/ooops.html
http://sandradodd.blogspot.com/2009/10/me-at-my-house-this-week.html

http://100speciesdodd.blogspot.com/2009/10/october-29-2009-sea-onion-at-it-again.html

Thoughts and Progress

2009-04-14T10:26:00.000-07:00

http://100speciesdodd.blogspot.com/
I got tired of that one. I have enough photos to do maybe 20 more, and then I plan to write a mini-manifesto about how 19th century it is to want people to identify plants, and I bet the guy who generated the statement wouldn't be able to name 100 magazines or newspapers or 100 professional musicians or 100 musical instruments, or makes of automobiles. NO WAY could he name 100 movies or actors or TV shows!

I wrote the above notes months ago. My yard is full of budding, sprouting, greening this'n'that.

Recently I've added to a couple of posts. There's a real-time video of a moonflower opening (I didn't make it; I lifted it, but you can follow the link back). There's a photo of some tulips that came back up this year (more now than before, as evidenced by last year's photo).

http://100speciesdodd.blogspot.com/2008/10/28-moonflowers.html
http://100speciesdodd.blogspot.com/2008/08/14-tulips.html

I do still intend to add to this blog, but the initial steam has cooled. That's okay. I don't mind projects taking years. Maybe someday I will get to 100 and maybe I won't, but my yard continues to improve little by little every year either way. And when I can't take care of it anymore or if someone lives here after us who has different priorities, some of the plants might go dormant, or die. Much of what is here was here for years, unwatered and unloved, but when we moved in and watered and dug around, things came up! So some of the things I've brought here or that were here that we nurtured might similarly surprise someone else in a few decades. Cool!

But back to my original thoughts about naming 100 of ANYthing, I re-read this, about my visit to Kirk Ella with Holly eight years ago.
SandraDodd.com/eastyorkshire

I read it because I'm corresponding with some unschoolers in the U.K. about a visit I'm making there in July. And I realized that knowing a lot about one town in England ("a lot" meaning some history, some people, some geography, when the store opens and whether they have Dr Pepper, where the snickleways are, how far to Beverley) is different from seeing and naming 100 castles, or 100 towns, or 100 parish churches. But reading all the names on the gravestones in ONE church, hearing the bellringers practice the changes, finding a big toad in the churchyard... that's better than remembering the name of the church.

If I take photos of my grocery-store tulips every year and document their divisions and growth, that might be better than naming 100 strains of tulips. Planting tulips and not EVER taking their picture is better than feeling agitation about what a dead guy thinks about whether I can name 100 species.

I'm treating this like a game, and not like a test, and if I get distracted and start doing something else, I'm still playing. And in the end it's not whether I win or lose, its whether I knew it was a game.

I don't know what those flowers are. I don't remember what little town we were in that day.
I remember Holly touching flowers growing on an ancient wall in an alley across from a pub that wasn't open yet.

#32 Burro's tail

2009-03-20T06:35:00.000-07:00

Burro's tail. It's a succulent—a desert plant like a cactus, but not with any pokey-parts.
The dice and game card aren't usually there.

I got this from my friend Steve. He has his in a pot and takes it in in winter. I dug mine up and took it in the first year, but the next year I left some out, and this year I left it all out. Seems to have survived fine, though it doesn't stay in the very same place. Some babies live, and some older plants get walked on (because it's right by the back door), but it's doing well!

I read up on it and it's from Mexico. In an image search, it showed people using it as a hanging-basket plant.

The photo above is a couple of years old, and was taken for the lyrics game, when the word was "dark." http://lyricsgame.blogspot.com/2007/09/dark.html

Lately I find images for each new word, but early on I was setting the cards in various places, rolling dice and photographing the two of them. Some of those photos are fun. I did it on a trip to the zoo, and on a trip to Colorado.

#31 Sage Brush

2008-10-26T09:55:00.000-07:00

I could probably name two dozen "cokes" but not that many kinds of "kleenex," and the general name for this type of growth is "sage brush." Of what is technically sage brush, there's more than one kind. Probably some of what's in the picture is and some isn't. Because I'm neither a botanist nor a landscaper, "sage brush" is close enough for me.

This photo is across the valley from my house, but there are things like these within a mile of my house.

Chamisa (#30) would be lumped in the "sage brush" category by me if I didn't know it's name.

#30 Chamisa

2008-10-26T08:48:00.001-07:00

In Española, where I grew up, this stuff was all around. Not in people's fields or yards, but in the wilder parts and the no-longer-farmed parts.

This one is growing behind the tire store behind us, on a part of their lot they've had landscaped. There's a little watering tube coming up from the ground there, so the plant is unnaturally big. It's nearly 5' tall and bigger than that around.

#29 African Violet

2008-10-26T04:34:00.000-07:00

When I was 13 and 14, I was in a 4-H club based on botany. We did crops judging, flower arranging, and the care of houseplants. I loved the flower arranging and remembered years later how to use the wires and tape to make coursages and head wreaths and boutonnieres. We each had an African Violet to take care of, and that I didn't much like. I remember a great fear of the presence of mealy bugs, or of watering incorrectly.

Last winter, there were two African Violets in a batch of plants given to me. I didn't figure they would live, and I didn't take very special African-violet care of them. In Spring I put them out in the yard with other plants, in a shady place where they could be watered easily.

I was sometimes careful to put the water on the dirt and not the leaves, but they were outside and sometimes getting some sprinkler water and rain (not much rain this summer).

Then one day in late September there was a bloom!

It lasted several weeks.

I know the leaves look terrible. They had too much sun and too much water. (They greened up after a few weeks in the kitchen.)

So African violets aren't local, but this one came to my house and bloomed.

#28 Moonflowers

2008-10-20T08:40:00.001-07:00

A couple of years ago I had moonflowers all up the high side of the end of our house. I think that wall is about 17' tall.

I skipped a year, from social obligations and schedules. They really are difficult to get started here.

This year there were a few, and those in a pot did better than others.

And here's a moonflower that didn't every fully open because the days are still warm but the nights are cold.

More on my moonflowers here, with photos of the HUGE seedlings (and I'll add seed pod photos there in a couple of months):
SandraDodd.com/moonflowers

I forgot to make photos of the seed pods. I'm writing in April 2009. The few seeds I got last year didn't germinate, but I still had bought seeds, and I have seedlings started in peat pots.

#27 Fruitless Mulberry

2008-10-08T09:49:00.000-07:00

In our back yard there are two fruitless mulberries. When we first moved here eleven years ago, it seemed they might both die. The west tree is very near the house, and it seemed some roots were destroyed by an addition to the house, and then the others were driven and parked on when our house was used for several years as a halfway house for University of New Mexico hospital treatment facilities. Employees would park in the back up near the door, it seems.

Those rings show the early years of the tree, then the nine years it was totally unwatered, and this part of the central trunk was cut when we first moved here.

The place from which it was cut is shown (but in a current photo). That central trunk had dried up entirely.

Other branches came back, though, and it's a big tree now again. The photo below is three years old. It's doing even better now.

The leaf that appears on the main page of the Always Learning list is from that tree. It grew swirly for some reason. I thought it was pretty, and stuck it into the scanner with blue paper behind it:

Here's a 2008 Robin's nest Holly could see from her bathroom window, in the western tree:

The other tree is on the east side of the back yard, not so near the house, but the upper branches come onto the deck which is outside the library (the room above the garage). Keith put beams to catch water, and we have drained the hot tub here many times, so it continues to recover. Holly has always liked to climb it, and swing on the large, soft rope Keith put up in there years ago.

The top of that tree still has dead twigs up top, but the birds don't mind. Here are some doves Holly photographed in the eastern tree this summer:

One year all the leaves fell off that tree in a single day, from some odd cold snap, without wind. They were just on the ground in a circle. Our yard has benefitted greatly from compost made of the leaves of these trees.

And it can hold a piñata!

#26 Storm Lily

2008-09-16T11:14:00.000-07:00

I KNOW WHAT THIS IS!!!!

It hasn't fully unfolded yet, and I wouldn't know what it is, except that I discovered one (from the same bulb, probably) in full bloom in my yard a few years ago and people on the internet told me what it was. "Surprise Lily" or "Storm Lily."

The last time was also September, in 2005:

I'll bring a photo of the new one when it's opened up.

I bought a dozen bulbs of that and put them in the back, but none has come up yet. Judging by this one, having come up twice in ten years, I'm not expecting them every year.

It took until Friday afternoon for it to open, and I wish I hadn't missed the half-way point. Holly took these photos and that's her hand, for scale. This one was shorter than the one in 2005, and it didn't open as quickly.

# X Stinkhorn

2008-08-25T07:16:00.001-07:00

This one isn't getting a number. They don't "grow within walking distance," though one did come up in my yard at our old house a few miles and a couple of decades from here.

I will give you an image (not my photo), a link (which leads to another link, too), and a warning.

Stinkhorn

Those posts, as a set, are rated R,
for language, suggestive simulated nudity,
and special-effects grossness.

Commentary the First

2008-08-19T13:00:00.000-07:00

Twenty five. That's a stopping place. I do have some other photos from my first day of walking up to the big patch of goat heads. There are lots of weeds whose names I don't know.

I'm really enjoying seeing the other participants' lists and photos, and if you go to any one of them you'll probably get to others still. Some people live right next to wild-growing incredible beauty. I guess I do too, but I'm used to this stuff, and theirs seems as exotic as something from another world sometimes.

I think I can get to fifty. I will have to do some research to get to a hundred, so I'm thinking of conceding right now to the original charge (quoted at the bottom of the blogpage) that I might be one of the most people who can't name 100 plants within walking distance.

My "failure" in this area, though, reminds me of Howard Gardner's theory of intelligences. This plant naming is an intelligence called "Nature Intelligence." It's a sorting and naming intelligence, so it applies to bugs and automobiles and heraldry and Magic cards too—the ability to categorize and recognize things. When Kirby was a toddler, we could show him something we found on the floor—a piece of plastic or a knob or a game piece or a screw—and he would know what it had come off of or fallen out of or belonged to in the house. He totally has that.

This is not my talent, but I do enjoy learning about these plants, and I kinda surprised myself with the stories that come with them. I like that too, that each plant is connected to places and people, for me. To history, and geography, and particular neighbors.

In Henry V there's a speech in which he says there are things he can do, but mushy love-talk isn't one of them.

Marry, if you would put me to verses, or to dance for your
sake, Kate, why you undid me; for the one, I have neither
words nor measure, and for the other I have no strength in
measure, yet a reasonable measure in strength. If I could win a
lady at leap-frog, or by vaulting into my saddle with my armour
on my back, under the correction of bragging be it spoken, I
should quickly leap into a wife. Or if I might buffet for my
love, or bound my horse for her favours, I could lay on like a
butcher and sit like a jack-an-apes, never off. But, before God,
Kate, I cannot look greenly, nor gasp out my eloquence, nor I
have no cunning in protestation; only downright oaths, which I
never use till urg'd, nor never break for urging.
there's the rest of that scene

He's saying he's no good at poetry or music or dancing, but he's good at strength and fighting and horsemanship, and he can keep an oath, but can't speak romantically.

Had someone asked me to name 100 musical instruments, I could—and could play several of them. If someone asked me to quote from 100 movies without looking anything up, I could. Name 100 books with their authors. I could do that as fast as I could type them down, I think. "Sing 100 traditional ballads or songs." I could do that. Identify 100 traditional ballads from a snippet, heard or read. Out of all the ballads in the world I could identify 100. Out of 100 someone else chose, maybe 70.

I've been inside more than outside in my life. I used to get grief for it. "Put that book down and go outside." That probably served to keep me in more than to get me out, in the longrun. My sister said something about my late-blooming green thumb recently. I only started really caring about my yard and wild plants fairly recently.

So this blog is fun but I concede the race. I might not be posting so frequently here for a while, but I did take a bunch of photos yesterday and will get to cataloging those. And I haven't done my onions yet!

If anyone wants to share the URL of another 100 Species site that's not listed in the sidebar, please leave it and I'll add it.

#25 Day Lilies

2008-08-19T00:01:00.000-07:00

This is a hybrid daylily called "Pardon Me." I ordered three bulbs in 2006 and now I have lots more. They're pretty happy here. I have five kinds of daylilies. These were the last blooming this year, and this photo is a week old. I have some other photos from other seasons of the others. I'll add them as I come to them, or maybe add some next summer if I don't come across any.

This video is from last year, and these are called "Fulva" daylilies:

The darker ones above are just behind and to the right of these tall orange ones.

#24 Juniper

2008-08-18T00:05:00.000-07:00

This was here when we moved here, but it's healthier now. It's growing up around the mailbox. I don't know exactly what type of juniper this is, except it's the kind that's been planted in lots of yards in Albuquerque! (We had some at our old house.)

The lighter green at the bottom is morning glory, and you can see it climbing up toward the mail box. There's some on the other side. There's no way morning glory can hurt this big old juniper bush.

The odd-angled wood plank to the left is a bridge over a hole that fills up when it rains a lot. So usually it just looks like an oddly placed ramp, but those few times it rains hard, it's an important bridge. The house that shows is where Harry and Betty live, who have the trumpet vine in back, and who have some of our Virginia creeper on their front porch. You can see it, in the photo, looking kinda squarish in front of their door! And to the right of their house (in the photo) there's a bigger juniper that hasn't been chopped back (or not lately, anyway). To the right of that, the plum trees from #6. So... I'm hardly walking outside my yard, so far!

#23 Mimosa

2008-08-17T00:01:00.000-07:00

When I was little (the theme of a lot of this!) we had two mimosa trees in front of our house in Texas. When we moved to New Mexico (to Española) my mom kept trying to transplant some there but they wouldn't live. Nobody there had one.

Ninety miles south, though, in Albuquerque, they will (and do) grow.

This is a baby of our neighbor's mimosa. We had some at our old house, also offspring of our neighbor's tree there, and we moved them to the back after they came up in the front flowerbed. They're big, at our old house, and healthy. At our new house, smaller but last year and this year there were blooms.

When I was in a verdant southern state I commented on mimosa trees growing wild in low places and said I thought they were wonderful, and a local said they were trailer trash trees. Maybe where trees are plentiful, they're not in the top ten. But here where trees are rare and valuable, if one of those comes up on its own, I'm personally going to water it and try to keep it safe from foot traffic and lawn mowers!

#22 Honeysuckle

2008-08-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

I bought two plants at Lowe's (which is walking distance, but it still doesn't make them native) a few years ago, hoping they'll fill up this part of the fence. They've gone high but not spread out too much. It's pretty shady in this little corner of the yard. They bloom white and yellow, but not right now.

There used to be honeysuckle around the outside a round lecture room at the college of education at the University of New Mexico. in the late 60's and 70's.

#21 Mint

2008-08-15T08:04:00.000-07:00

For this we need some html for scratch'n'sniff, and I don't think that's available yet. Just walking through it or touching it stirs up the wonderful smell, though.

There was a bunch of mint growing in front of my friend Jeff's house and they were going to move, so I dug some up. They didn't like it. It kept coming up under the border, on the lawn, because it spreads by roots. I think that's fine!

This has some of the mint from the photo above (lower right) and some vinca (#11 below, near the tree trunk):

Here are some clickable enlargeable ones. The tallest plants get to be 2 and a half feet tall or so (75 cm or a little more). The babies come right up from spreading roots, and there are some near a New Mexico quarter and a Flair pen (sorry for those without full famliarity with Flairs and quarters). Oh! And one of those, I noticed when I saw the full size image, has some dead bug parts. Grasshopper and maybe a spider? One of those with the quarter.

#20 Bermuda Grass

2008-08-14T00:01:00.000-07:00

This little patch of grass was dug out of the middle of some Bermuda grass. That patch grew in already and this one has about doubled. By next year it will be about nine times more than itself right now (whatever that is mathematically... it will spread out its own width in every direction, or maybe even more if it's really rainy and I remember to loosen up the soil.

Here's some that was growing between a wooden deck and the concrete step outside the back door. It was long because it had no ground to stick into and it's not in a place that gets mowed. So you can see the details.

I did pour water on it, but didn't give it time to soak before I dug it up with my fingers impatiently to bring it in and scan it. The roots are pretty strong, and it won't hurt much that I broke them off. I'll stick all this in a pan of water, and in a week or two there will be roots coming out at every joint in that grass, and I can just dig a trench with anything like a screwdriver and lay the rooty grass in there and cover it. Sometimes it dies and sometimes it lives, but when it lives it can live and spread for years.

I know that people in very wet places sometimes consider Bermuda grass an invasive weedy thing, but here where grass from seed is hard to grow and has to be watered every other day or so, grass that can thrive in the desert is pretty exciting stuff. Green is valuable here. Shade is valuable here.

When I pass through places like eastern Oklahoma, Arkansas.... I see the yards and people with ride-on mowers and my first thought is that they must be RICH to have a whole acre of lawn! Then I was told once that if they leave home for a month, their whole driveway can turn to grass. In New Mexico if you leave home for a month, your lawn will die in your absence, unless you've persuaded a house-sitter to water it at least twice a week (and more if there's new grass or it's really dry).

#19 Chinese Elm

2008-08-13T09:52:00.001-07:00

In the 1940's and 50's the city of Albuquerque brought a bunch of fast-growing shade trees for the city parks. Lots are still there, but the city doesn't want people planting any more. We're waiting for those to die, but they keep reproducing and they're very hard to kill. There's one between our house and Angela's (neighbor to the east), on her side of the wall, and we have some little ones on the west side of the house that come back if we forget to try to thwart them.

#18 Sunflowers

2008-08-13T09:00:00.000-07:00

I do get to the sunflowers, but I got distracted at first.

In October 2006, Holly and I visited relatives in northern New Mexico. I took these two photos of round things in my nephew Elijah's yard:

That squirrel did not lay those eggs, y'know... And he wasn't eating them either. He was eating the grain.

And this sunflower, still on the stalk:

I told him I had photographed it, and he cut it off and gave it to us.

By the ditch, in a field belonging to one of his other-side uncles, he had planted big sunflowers on the side of the ditch, and was selling the flowers at the organic growers' market in Santa Fe. This one might have been even bigger had it been near the ditch and not in his yard!

So we brought it home and I set it out on the deck for us to look at and for birds to peck at. Later in the year I broke it up, put the seeds out for birds, and put the rest of it in the back compost.

Near the compost there grew one huge sunflower—not as big as its mama, but big. That one, I saved the seeds from. This year I planted them and the video above is one of the results. So it's the grandbaby of Elijah's giant sunflower.

Here are some others. Elijah saw them a couple of weeks ago and said they were planted too close. I'm sure he's right, but we're in the rocky sandy foothills, not in an irrigated river valley. I'm surprised they grew at all!

We also have smaller sunflowers growing, that make little black seeds. Those just came in the birdseed we buy from Costco. We planted it birdseed in three places in the yard. The bottom ones in the image above are the smaller ones. Here's the patch I tried to point out in the video up top, too. They're in the front corner of the yard where there used to be rocks and weeds, taken from the sidewalk, toward the house.

#17 Virginia Creeper

2008-08-11T21:51:00.001-07:00

I like the shadow of it, too.

I didn't know what this was called, though quite a bit came up when we first moved here and started watering our yard. Then we got new neighbors. Harry is an old guy who grew up in Pinos Altos, near Silver City, and told me it was all around his house when he was little and it was Virginia Creeper. I asked if he wanted some and he said sure, yes, that would be great. His wife was less enthusaistic. But when we had some well rooted, Keith and I asked Harry where he wanted it, and we put it there, and though his wife grumped some (as she does), there's a fence kind of in front of their front porch that's all covered now in Virginia Creeper.

There are seasonal features not showing now. Blooms. Fall colors. Now, in August, it just has the green.

That biggest pile of vines is growing up on a tripod of steel conduit covered in chicken wire on two sides. It was to have been temporary. There was a tree there and in a storm it leaned over so far I was afraid it might fall on Harry's house, so I persuaded Keith to have it removed quickly so we wouldn't hurt someone or be sued for damages. But that tree had vines on it, and so we gave them a "temporary" home. There's another pipe that goes from the tripod to the nearest tree, and so I wrapped plastic netting around it loosely and it's covered over with vine now too. The temporary solution has become longterm, but that's okay.

#16 Snake Grass

2008-08-11T21:50:00.001-07:00

This is a reed that grew wild on the sides of the irrigation ditches in Española when I was a kid. What's in my yard right now was transplanted in early Spring and hasn't taken good hold yet. It's alive, but not thriving. I put it by the catalpa tree, where water collects, and I hope next year it will come up for real. A few new shoots came up, but I'm sure it was traumatized by being moved. I tried to pull some of the dead 2007 stalks, but it disturbed roots so I'm leaving them alone now.

When it's busy and healthy, some of the stalks grow a top that looks like a rattlesnake rattle (kind of), which might be where the name came from, or not. If and when it's well hydrated and spreads a little so it's worth sacrificing some, I'll try to make a video of how you can take a section and make a noise-maker (double reed... sounds like a kazoo). Each one will only make one note. My cousin Nada and I used to find two that harmonized and blow them at the same time. One person can make a chord.

#15 Lilacs

2008-08-11T10:48:00.000-07:00

The first photo is from mid-May. Below is what they look like this week (August).

These were from my sister, and they were very small when she gave them to us, when we moved to this house eleven years ago this fall.

We had lilacs in our yard when we were kids, too. Some people's are white, but this is the same color we had when we were little, and that my sister had when she lived in Chamita.

#14 Tulips

2008-08-11T10:45:00.000-07:00

These came from the grocery store, which is walking distance. They bloomed when they were new last year and in their pots. I put them in the yard and they came up and bloomed again, early this spring! Hooray!

I like the way the sun came through and lit them up.

2009 update:

~~Five this year!~~ Six!

#13 Strawberries

2008-08-11T10:44:00.000-07:00

My friend Laine (Viviana) moved to Arkansas (Calontir) in the winter, and Keith and Ben helped her load up. So she gave them, to give me, some pots that had been on the patio, in the yard, somewhere. Outside plants. So when Spring came and they got some water, things came up in a couple of them. Early on, this made one biggish strawberry which I ate. Then in early August it made two, and Keith and I ate them. There's one little stunty one that seems to have stalled out small.

That was a fun surprise.

When I was little, we used to find wild strawberries up in the mountains. My dad would take us camping fairly often and we'd climb around and eat the strawberries we would find, but they were like the end of your little finger (if your hand is small) and there wouldn't be more than four or five on a plant.

So this is not native, but it also came up in my yard without my expecting that it would!

UPDATE:
strawberry blossom, March 2009:

#12 Potatoes

2008-08-11T10:43:00.000-07:00

These grew in a flowerpot in my back yard. How's that? They're not native and local, but they're for real potatoes!

On the Radical Unschoolers Network I blogged about these the day I dug them up, which was August 2, 2008.

A couple of years ago, a potato bloomed in the compost pile:

The flowers were so beautiful I've grown others. So I don't mind if potatoes are growing eyes in my kitchen. That could mean flowers (or baby potatoes). Here are my remaining plants:

I planted sprouting potatoes in a half-filled pot so I have room to add more dirt as the season goes on. Whatever grows grows. I'm not farming potatoes, I'm just messing around.

#11 Vinca

2008-08-11T10:42:00.000-07:00

The vinca we have blooms with little flat purple flowers, but not right now. It spreads like crazy, and is a beautiful dark green. It was all along the front of our old house. I didn't know the name of it for years; didn't even wonder. I was busy with the SCA and having babies.

The very same kind of vinca is in several spots in our current yard. We didn't bring it here. It's here and it's healthy. I chop it back so other plants have a chance too.

Here's some near Marty's bedroom window:

UPDATE:
late March 2009:

#10 Western Catalpa

2008-08-11T10:28:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid we had a catalpa tree in the front yard and it was beautiful. So when I was grown I wanted one. I've brought babies from the yard of a friend, and we had one at the old house, and brought two to this house (we moved here nearly eleven years ago).

The big leaf in the water is from the catalpa,and the flowers around it are vinca (#11) on the left and morning glories on the right, but I'll go around and show you the tree.

The seed pods always looked like cigars to me when I was little, and the blossoms looked like giant popcorn.

Here's the tree from below one early spring day when the leaves were still coming in:

and here are the blossoms.

I couldn't find my own photo of blossoms, so I have lifted this one from Colorado State University, and it's a link to their page with more photos.

#9 Morning Glories

2008-08-11T10:12:00.001-07:00

I have had morning glories in my yard nearly every year since I was little, and usually they come from seed from the same yard. Below is one growing out onto the sidewalk. It won't last, but I am pointing to it with my shadow nose and finger:

In three places, we have compost piles enclosed by hogwire bent onto itself into a circle like a bin, a couple or three feet across, and staked to the ground. Then there's plastic net fastened with bag ties from the top edge of that up to the roof gutter in one place, and into the trees on two others. There are two great benefits: The flowers cover up the compost pile, and the presence of the flowers gets the compost watered (or watering the compost benefits the flowers). Sometimes we go a long time without rain here, and compost won't work when it's really dry, but it can seem a shame to just water the compost pile. So this creates symbiosis, and lack of guilt, and beauty. The lump on the right is the compost bin, but the plastic goes both straight up to the branch, and over to the tree, and there are flowers planted all around the tree too.

Here's the one by the back door that goes up to the gutter, and some close-ups of blossoms.

There are photos of seedlings and a video of the way they look for a wire or string or branch and then twine (not a video I made) here: SandraDodd.com/morningglories.

#8 Trumpet Vine

2008-08-11T10:08:00.000-07:00

These hang over the wall from Harry and Betty's back yard, next door to us. I really like passing by them but sometimes there are bees.

#7 Century Plant

2008-08-11T10:04:00.000-07:00

These are behind the tire store off the alley behind us. These kinds of plants send up tall shoots of white flowers, but certainly not every year, nor even every decade. In southern New Mexico where there are fields of them (or desertscapes full of them--nobody planted them there), there are always some in that state, but I might never see these two do anything. I think that's why they call them "century plants." Very slow cycle.

#6 Ornamental Plum

2008-08-11T09:52:00.000-07:00

I'm glad to be corrected on any of what I think I think these things are. I don't doubt I could be wrong about "the real name" of something, and there are regional differences.

These are in the same back yard as the cottonwood (it's peeking up over the top there), but at our old house we had two of them (planted in the 50's, not doing so well by 1990), and I got another wounded one one 4th of July when the kids were little. I had been sent with $30 to get fireworks, and came back with $15 worth of fireworks and a $15 plum tree with wounded bark. We patched it up and planted it. We don't live there anymore, and our renters don't water trees enough, but somewhere I have a photo of that planting day and I hope to add it here the next time I come across it.

The wood from these trees is really nice. When we bought our new house there was one in the back yard, just the trunk and some dead branches, and it's beautiful dark hardwood (hard for New Mexico, anyway).

#5 Arizona Cypress

2008-08-10T16:24:00.000-07:00

Those trees in the header art above? Arizona Cypress. This is another tree people with allergies cringe from. There's a whole row along the back edge of our yard. I took the photo looking almost straight up, trying to get a big patch of sky. Two have died since they were planted in the 1970's. There's another one, BEAUTIFUL, in our front yard.

It's the big one to the right. And here's a view from beneath it looking out. I have bird feeders in there:

In the Spring when it gets hot, I guess the little cones (they're round, not conical, but they still get the coniferous terminology) break open and the pollen just drifts down like dust.

They drop sap, which isn't good. It looks like amber, sometimes. (Well it kinda IS like amber, but raw. )

#4 Cottonwood Tree

2008-08-10T16:11:00.000-07:00

This cottonwood tree is in the backyard of our neighbors John and Linda. They live across the cul-de-sac, and the ragweed from #3 is just outside the corner of their back yard.

Two years ago a roving tree-trimming guy kinda butchered their tree and they were afraid it might die, but it's coming back.

When I was little I lived on a road southeast of Española, called Lower San Pedro. It paralleled the Rio Grande. There had been at one time (1910 or so) cottonwoods planted all along that road, and when I was little there were still several fat and healthy ones (much larger than the one pictured above). Because they grew out toward the road, though, it caused a road that had once been pretty straight to be a little curvy and bumpy. Especially on bicycles we could notice how the road was a little higher where the cottonwood roots were, and we had to go around where they were in the road. That was the 1960's. Some of them had died by then, more are dead now.

When I was thirteen or so, lightning struck one on the land of the neighbor behind us and broke off about 1/3 of it. Even though it had been raining and the tree was alive, down in where it struck, it burned the tree, and it smouldered for a while, and was scarred from that burn for years.

When the seeds come out of the cottonwood trees, it would seem like it was snowing. They were a little heavier than what comes off a dandelion, but they'd be coming from way up high. Sometimes they would drift up against a wall or the wind would blow a swirl of them into a corner, and you could pick up a handful of them. Some people are allergic to them but I loved trying to catch the seeds in the air.

They're not really very good trees, in many ways. They're shady, but the wood isn't great to burn. It's light (not dense) and stinky. And where they grow wild along the Rio Grande (the woods along the river are called the bosque), they take up a LOT of water.

#3 Ragweed

2008-08-10T15:58:00.001-07:00

I'm aware that the term "ragweed" a general term and applies to very different plants in different places, maybe because they were once used for cleaning stuff, or maybe because they can make paper out of them. Honestly I have no idea, but this is what I know as ragweed where I live.

The tallest plants against the wall and to the left. They kinda look like tumbleweeds when they're young and short.

They grow most of their seeds up on the top and on the ends of "branches" but the seeds are soft until the very end of the season, and even then they're never stickers.

Here's a closeup of the top of one. I chose this one because the stem is striped purply like young tumbleweeds. I don't think they're related (or not closely, at least).

They can grow to be six feet tall or more if they get enough water, but some are grown and done at two feet tall. That's kinda how desert plants go. These break off at the end of the season too, and if they were round they could roll, but they have the shape of Christmas trees.

When they're young, like this one, horses will eat them. They're not harvested and fed to horses, but kids will feed them to horses and if horses are where those weeds are, they'll eat the tops. We had an apple orchard when I was a kid, and I think it would've been full of those if not for Kate our horse.

#2 Tumbleweed

2008-08-10T15:42:00.000-07:00

Walking around the patch of goatheads from post #1, there is a tumbleweed.

If you click the picture, and then click that one, you can get a closeup.

This is a half grown tumbleweed. It's not the size that makes it halfgrown, it's that there aren't flowers or seeds forming yet. If it gets a lot more water it will get bigger. It's already two and a half feet tall.

Tumbleweeds are another plant I have already documented. There are only five, so don't think I've already done the whole hundred. I'll probably never get to a hundred, seriously. I probably won't get to fifty. I'll try, though!

SandraDodd.com/tumbleweeds

Oh, one more thing! That tumbleweed and some of the other plants that have grown so fast due to recent rains have lifted goatheads up two feet from the ground. Goatheads usually lie flat on the ground, but the presence of other plants can give them a boost up.

Added February, 2009:
A tumbleweed by the road on Indian School near Pennsylvania. Not tumbling. Just being. On the right near the car ahead, in the first of the three photos:

#1 Goatheads

2008-08-10T09:55:00.000-07:00

I shall begin with the first New Mexico plant I learned about, the hard way, when I was seven. Goatheads. Are there more or fewer now than in the 1960's? Fewer right next to me, and yet these are all walking distance and some were in my yard. The low plants with little yellow flowers are the goathead plants. The stickers (not yet ripe) are goatheads. They are all, as a group, in any form, called goatheads. click to enlarge

Those are growing between my house and the grocery store.

Below is a close-up of some right across the alley from my back gate. You can see the stickers starting to form.

I have a page with notes on goatheads that I started a few years ago SandraDodd.com/goatheads.
After the frost, I'll go and gather a bunch up and photograph them and bring the image back here, I hope. (Feel free to remind me, anyone who comes by here in a few months, if I haven't done it.)

8/11 addition: I found a photo I had marked up a while back to show how sweet and innocent the goatheads look when they come up in the yard:

When we lived at our old house, Keith and I pulled every goathead we EVER saw—we would walk into the neighbors' yards to pull them (they certainly didn't mind) because we had little kids who liked to go barefooted. I would pull them at public parks. I would take gloves and a bag when we would go to the park. Now our kids know what the plants look like and I don't pull the goatheads out of the neighbor's yard. :-)

And here are two older photos of vacant-lot goatheads, when it was dry. One shows a single plant about a foot across. The other shows a couple of more older plants, probably four or five feet across all of that, and those seeds were ready to get me. One seed/sticker can create hundreds more. This wasn't a great camera so they're not totally clear, but honestly, goatheads are not used to being photographed at all, so these did pretty well.

I didn't write the rules, I'm just reporting them

2008-08-10T09:05:00.000-07:00

These are the bare minimum rules (what was in bold). There were also comments (follow the link below). So if you start this challenge, link those rules and that site below, as I'm not the originator, just one of a growing number of challengees.

The 100-Species Challenge

1. Participants should include a copy of these rules and a link to this entry in their initial blog post about the challenge.

2. Participants should keep a list of all plant species they can name, either by common or scientific name, that are living within walking distance of the participant's home. The list should be numbered, and should appear in every blog entry about the challenge, or in a sidebar.

3. Participants are encouraged to give detailed information about the plants they can name in the first post in which that plant appears.

4. Participants are encouraged to make it possible for visitors to their blog to find easily all 100-Species-Challenge blog posts.

5. Participants may post pictures of plants they are unable to identify, or are unable to identify with precision. They should not include these plants in the numbered list until they are able to identify it with relative precision. Each participant shall determine the level of precision that is acceptable to her; however, being able to distinguish between plants that have different common names should be a bare minimum.

6. Different varieties of the same species shall not count as different entries (e.g., Celebrity Tomato and Roma Tomato should not be separate entries); however, different species which share a common name be separate if the participant is able to distinguish between them (e.g., camillia japonica and camillia sassanqua if the participant can distinguish the two--"camillia" if not).

7. Participants may take as long as they like to complete the challenge.

Now my comments:
I'm not sure there ARE 100 species (not natural locals) within easy walking distance of my house. So I'll have to include imports and exotics and I might have to visit the plant store or the florists' (both within easy walking distance).

I believe in teamwork, so when I don't know something, I hope others will help me identify it and then I will study at night and memorize, and then I can count it. Or I could come and look on the blog when I forget.

This may take me a year or I may never finish, and it will be like... like an unfinished thing. Like St Francis Cathedral, in Santa Fe. Like the Tower of Babel. Like... many of my other projects!