Photo copyright 2012 Peggy Fountain Moody Summer has many sounds here in the Texas Hill Country. Occasionally, during the day, I hear the throaty, strumming call of the secretive yellow-billed cuckoo–my mother called it a rain crow and believed that it signaled rain (I wish oh I wish). At night, there’s the plaintive quank quank of the tree frogs. And [...]
Native Sunflowers

Our common sunflower is uncommonly beautiful this year, after two years of drought here in the Hill Country. This native sunflower is Helianthus annuus–native, that is, to the Americas, although it has now traveled around the planet. (I’ve been reading Charles Mann’s wonderful book, 1493, and appreciating more than ever the global migrations of native American plants.) Sunflower seeds went to [...]
Prickly Pear in a Texas Wildscape

Our thirty-one acre corner of the Texas Hill Country used to be a sprawling ranch, mostly used for grazing longhorn cows and ornery goats, part of it for raising cotton, before cotton ruined the soil and the boll weevil ruined the cotton. It wasn’t long after that when an opportunistic plant began to colonize the [...]
Sumac: A Small Prairie Miracle

It’s mid-August here in the Texas Hill Country–an August that most of us have never seen before. The summer has been fiercely dry, with no rain to speak of since mid-May, and the heat is brutal: there are few clouds to shade the landscape and no soil moisture to buffer the blaze of the sun.The air is [...]




