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 [...]
About Susan Wittig Albert
Susan Wittig Albert is a mystery author who has incorporated her love of nature and her concern for the environment into her fiction. The China Bayles mysteries feature a Texas herbalist and gardener. The Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter tell the story of naturalist, conservationist, and children's author Beatrix Potter, who bought a farm in the English Lake District in the early 1900s. Her latest project, the Darling Dahlias mysteries, is set in 1930s Alabama and features a garden club. She publishes All About Thyme, a free weekly celebration of the plants, domestic and wild, that have enriched our lives.
In addition to her fiction, Susan has also written two recent memoirs about her life with her husband (and co-author) Bill Albert in the Texas Hill Country: An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days and Together Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place. The Alberts have lived for the past 25 years on 31 acres of meadows and woodland, where they garden and tend a varying assortment of farm animals, including chickens, geese, ducks, cows, and sheep. Bill is an accomplished woodturner. You can follow their lives and work at Susan's blog, LifeScapes, or on Facebook and Twitter.
Native Sunflowers
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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
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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
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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 [...]
