Terrapin Station

One more picture - the Resurrection Plant!

Can you see it...in the back of the container is the bright green sweet potato vine I've been nursing along, but in the front is a ball moss, tillandsia recurvata. 

Ken's mom used to call this a resurrection plant, because it would look greybrown and totally dead, and then when it gets wet, it greens right back up!  A miracle!  The oak trees around our campsite were thick with them. 

This is an epiphyte - not a parasite.  (That means it lives on the tree but doesn't harm it or take anything from it, besides a home).

I am a good Girl Scout, so I know the rule about "take nothing but pictures...leave nothing but footprints."  I waited until we got OUT of the State Park to pick this one up off the ground.  I have it in my St. Francis garden...eager to see how it does here.  We don't have the same humidity that they do in Austin, but WE have irrigation.  :)

One of Nature's Funnies

In this part of Texas we have a tree called the Bois d'Arc.  Being Texans, we call it the "bowdark."  Ken tells me that the wood was used for bows and arrows by the native Americans, but I don't know if that's true. 

We have a number of these trees; they look like this: 

Ken is very fond of their gnarly look. 

Bowdarks make a thing - a fruit?  that looks like this: 

It's generally the size of a softball or larger.  Guess who eats them?

Squirrels.  They like to carry them up into a tree and rip them apart (somehow!) and then throw down the little parts they don't want onto the driveway, or onto YOU.  (There's a theory that the squirrels get high on them, but I have no idea about that, either.)  But!  The little pieces are terribly sticky!  So are bowdarks if they get mashed by a car wheel.  And then they decay....ewww.  So right now I'm on bowdark patrol! 

Bowdarks are also most fun to bowl.  If you have a quiet street you can bowl them down the gutter.  We don't, but we like to bowl them ACROSS our street and see how high they bounce when they reach the opposite curb.  Be sure you don't have any stealthy bicyclists whizzing toward you; Ken pegged a guy one time.  He felt terrible!