Stinkhorn Mushroom - Clathrus columnatus - Fruiting Body
This is the mature fruiting body of the Stinkhorn Mushroom - Clathrus columnatus. Notice the blob of olive brown slime at the top beneath the octopus like tentacles. This has the odor and appearance of rotting flesh, attracting flies which unwittingly carry spores to new locations for colonization.
The cold weather earlier this week has warmed and last night the temperature and humidity were up. This morning I awoke to a dense fog in the garden and stepping out on the patio my nose immediately informed me the Stinkhorn Fungus (Clathrus columnatus) has started its cool weather fruiting season.
Stinkhorn Mushrooms are weird creatures. Neither plant nor animal, they often have bizarre fantastic fruiting bodies with the odor of something very dead! My mushroom is an octopus like creature rising out of a partially submerged white ‘egg’, standing several inches tall in a bed of decaying leaves and wood mulch.
Inside brightly flesh colored arched octopus like legs are blobs of foul-smelling, olive brown slime attracting flies and slugs. This bizarre adaptation is one of natures ways of dispersing the spores of this very smelly and strange organism. Duped flies crawl over the fruiting body as if it were a piece of ripe decaying meat all the time consuming and picking up fertile spores. Soon they fly away, carrying mushroom spores to new locations, possibly some new fertile bed of fresh wood mulch or leaf litter where a new mushroom colony might colonize and repeat the endless cycles of mushroom life.
On humid days like today, the odor of a fruiting Stinkhorn Mushroom is noticeable 20 to 30 feet away. I don’t need to see the mushroom to know it is present as nothing else has an odor quite like this one. And although it’s not a pleasant odor, it’s not that objectionable to me either, and I enjoy watching these unusual mushrooms growing in my garden during the wet winter months.
This common but unusual mushroom can be found from North Carolina down along the Gulf Coast and deep into Mexico.
For more information on this and other Stinkhorn Mushrooms species, check out this link. Mushroom Expert
Every since I was a child I’ve enjoyed capturing images of nature with my camera. In this selection of images made during 1984 in my garden I share a few of my garden art images with you. In future posts, I’ll add more of these experimental artistic images from the garden in years past.
I’ve been working with my current garden since 1980. I enjoy watching the daily and seasonal changes my garden is always going through. These changes are often ephemeral in nature and capturing fleeting moments with a camera is often the only choice for remembering and sharing the events with others.
Image Notes: The scans are from 24 year old 35mm color slide film. My photo imaging equipment and style has changed since 1984 but the awe and fascination I see in Nature is evident in these old images anyway.
Pond Rainbow is a summer sunrise over my Bald Cypress pond using a prism filter to break the sunlight into all the colors of the rainbow.
The Queen of the Night Cactus - Epiphyllum oxypetalum is a tropical epiphytic cactus. In nature it clambers over tree limbs and rocks where sunlight is plentiful. It’s always a special occasion for me when this cactus is in flower. The large 8 inch wide fragrant night blooming flowers are one of the most beautiful I have ever seen.
On May 30th 1984 we experienced a nearly total solar eclipse in Houston, Texas. It was an awe-inspiring experience for me. By mid-daylight most of the sunlight had disappeared, hidden by the moon, bringing almost 90 percent darkness to my garden. The remaining light filtering through the leaves overhead created beautiful crescent circles of light at ground level. My dog Daisy was there with me that day and in this photo you can see the crescents of light falling all around her.
In 1984 the Cypress pond was a new feature in the garden. The Bald Cypress Trees (Taxodium distichum) were small, and the pond held water all year long. In later years as the trees matured, they quickly use all available water during dry summer months but during these early years it was filled with water and had many established varieties of water plants. One, the day blooming yellow water lilies bloomed almost every day during the warm months.
After rains or a good watering, the Blood Banana (Musa zebrina) leaves are covered with sparkling beads of due at daybreak. Sunlight breaks into rainbow colors on the leaf tops.
A friend brought a fish windsock as garden art and we hung it high in a Chinese Tallow Tree (Triadica sebifera).
Another friend brought a bag of American Bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana) which quickly naturalized around the pond. This is a photo of a mass of bullfrog eggs I found floating on the waters surface one summer morning. Another photo shows a bullfrog tadpole emerging from its aquatic life to start a new life on land. Bullfrogs are permanent residents around a pond and do not usually wander as long as sufficient water is available. My bullfrog population lived in the pond for 8 to 10 years before the pond started drying up in the summer because of the large trees using all the water.
Tiki Torches add a tropical touch to the garden. We often placed them around the garden for party’s and cookouts.
The sky above the garden is a feature most people never pay much attention to. For me it is an ever changing part of the garden landscape, often very beautiful if noticed.
In the fall and winter many of the trees loose their leaves for one last colorful splash for the year.
Tags: 1984, Artistic, Bullfrog, Bullfrog Eggs, Ephemeral, Epiphyllum oxypetalum, Experimental, Solar Eclipse, Tadpole, Taxodium distichum, Tiki Torches
What a surprise this evening when friends and family started calling with reports of snow falling in their Houston neighborhoods. Just around dark at 6pm it started snowing in my garden. Light at first, then periods of heavy flurries. I grabbed my camera and made some shots for you to view.
Snow is rare along the Gulf Coast, last time we had any snow like this was Christmas Eve of 2004 when about an inch of snow fell giving us the first ever White Christmas in Houston, Texas. For all you northern folks this probably seems pretty silly, getting all excited about a few flakes of snow, but it is pretty cool to see a few flakes of the white stuff every once in a while!
Hope this isn’t the start of an unusually cold winter. Winter doesn’t officially start for 10 more days. Here are the photos. Had any snow at your place recently? Comments welcome.
Tags: Houston, Snow, White Christmas, Winter
Winter may officially be a couple weeks away but it is cold and dreary out my windows this morning (mid-30s). It snowed hard in Austin last night and my weather forecast suggests a few flurries possible here in Houston today. Brrrrr I am not a winter person.
Usually I get up each morning grab some coffee or tea and do a walk through the garden. I skipped my walk this morning, too cold, windy, and wet. Yesterday was nice and warm around 75 degrees here. This is often the case along the Gulf Coast where cold fronts approach, pass, then recede like clockwork, and with each pass often bringing rain along the border of cold air meeting warm moist Gulf air.
It is this regular flip flopping of warm to cold and cold to warm with rain each way that prepares our countryside and garden for the spring awakening. As I said I don’t much care for winter but it is the memory of winter past that makes each spring such a beautiful time of year.
In my garden, winter signals the Bald Cypress trees to drop their leaves. Paperwhites, Easter Lilies and other bulbs are waking up and sending up new foliage. Sunlight has returned to ground level beneath the deciduous trees and winter annual ‘weeds’ like Oxalis and Galium aparine (Sticky Weed), and winter grasses are springing to life.
Some of my ‘tropicals’ seem to enjoy the cooler weather too. The Brugmansias (Angel Trumpets) are flowering, the Giant Powder Puff shrubs are in full bloom, the Staghorn Ferns are growing new leaves again, most of the species of Rhipsalis tropical cactus are flowering, and the Bilbergia Bromeliads are blooming, as are the Turks Cap Hibiscus.
When it does snow or freeze, I sort of enjoy it for a while (like for one day 
) and then I’ve had my fill and I’m ready for Spring. That will be two months away so I must find other things to do until then. Beds, borders, and paths need work on sunny days, and of course there is this blog to play with on cold dreary days like this.
Y’all stay warm.
Tags: Snow, Winter, Winter Weeds
Giant Clumping Bamboo can be a wonderful addition to the tropical look garden but if you haven’t grown giant clumping bamboo before, there are some tricks and techniques you might not know about to help keep your bamboo looking good. One of these is grooming, in this case grooming the clump into a beautiful shape that allows viewers to ’see through’ the lower parts of the clump. The advantages to this are exposing the culms to better enjoy their beauty, seeing through the culms to enjoy more distant vistas of the garden, and to make working and moving near the clump easier by preventing branching in the lower areas.
The image above is of a newly exposed new bud on a newly emerging culm. This is the best time to do bud removal in order to have nice smooth clean and beautiful lower culm trunks.
View the gallery above as single images or as a slide show. Each of the six images shows part of the process of removing new culm buds.
First a new culm will emerge from the clump and begin a rapid initial growth. The culm will emerge and grow to it’s full diameter right from the beginning and attain full height in just a few weeks. As the culm grows, the distance between nodes will expand and then the culm sheath that protects the immature culm will turn brown and fall off. This exposes the new bud that each culm ring possesses and it is at this time the bud can be cut out to prevent it from ever growing. This keeps the scarring to a minimum and insures nice smooth lower culms.
To remove a node bud, place the blade of a sharp knife at the top of a bud. I use a large Olfa type knife with replaceable blades that allow breaking off the tips for an always sharp cutting edge. Press the blade flat against the culm wall and apply pressure to cut down and separate the bud from the culm. Complete the removal by making another cut just above the node ring going straight into the culm just enough to completely remove the bud. Do any more additional clean up trimming to have a nice smooth cut area and you are done.
The small cut area will heal leaving minimal scarring and insure your culm trunks are beautifully smooth for showing off your specimen bamboo plants at their best.
If you want to remove existing old mature lower branches, use clippers or a small tooth saw. The cuts will not be as clean and smooth as early bud removal but still improve the appearance of your specimen clumping bamboos.
Iochroma’s are relative new in tropical collections. Their trumpet shaped flowers are small but come in beautiful shades of red, purple, and blue, yellow, and white. They are native to the mountainus cloud forests from Columbia to Peru, growing from 3200 to 7000 feet elevation. Iochromas do well here on the Gulf Coast, blooming almost year round. Like their close relatives, the Brugmansias, Iochromas especially like cool wet weather, but not freezing temperatures.
‘Indigo’ is one of my favorites because it produces dense clusters of deep purple flowers. The image above is one of my plants with a nice full cluster of flowers. I used this image for my writeup on Iochroma in the rare plant section of the Caldwell Nursery site, which is a good source for Iochromas. They are located just outside Houston in Rosenberg, Texas.
Another good source is Zone-9 Tropicals, in the Houston Heights area. Both Caldwell’s and Zone-9 Tropicals usually have several varieties of Iochroma’s in stock.
Iochroma’s are relatively easy to root from cuttings. They can be grown in the ground in Zone-9b and above climates and make good potted plant specimens in cooler areas where they must be brought in during freezing weather. The plants take to pruning well and can be kept in a compact shrub shape if desired.
My friend Randy Judd-Harrison has the biggest Iochroma I’ve ever seen growing in his Houston Heights garden. That plant must be 10 feet tall and is always covered with blooms. I’ve been inspired now to take better care of my plants and turn my Iochroma’s into specimens. You can read more about Randy’s garden adventures in his Houston Chronical Garden Blog and on Dave’s Garden.
The U. S. Department of Agriculture has an informative article on Iochroma’s here.
Sometimes simple green and white can make a beautiful statement in the garden. I feel this way about Thunbergia fragrans, the White Lady or Sweet Clock-Vine. The abundant pure white flowers bloom most of the growing season on small evergreen perennial vines with opposite arrowhead shaped leaves. The vine makes an easy to maintain ground cover, hanging basket subject, or a small cascading vine for trellises.
Thunbergia fragrans - Sweet Clock-Vine Flowers on Tropical Black Bamboo
Flowers last several days each with new ones opening daily. Seeds form in a 4 seeded beaked capsule and when ripe the capsule splits open and flings the seeds several feet away. In tropical wet areas the plant may become prolific but that has not been a problem in my Houston garden. Occasionally new plants sprout and I can easily pull them out or share with friends.
Thunbergia fragrans seed capsule
Thunbergia fragrans is native to Southeastern Asia and Malesia, and is sometimes cultivated as a garden ornamental around the world. The name implies the flowers might be fragrant but I have not noticed any fragrance with mine. Maybe they are fragrant on warm spring nights or some other specific time but not when I checked. The plants prefer full sun to bright shade.
I have seeds available and will list them on an upcoming sale page.
November 16-22, 2008 - ‘This Week in the Garden‘ post series is about the state of my garden as it is changing through time. Recently, Hurricane Ike changed my garden by pounding it with wind and rain. Indirectly the garden was given a new future, a changeable future. Part of this change was more than storm damage. Conditions after the storm suggested a major selective thinning could create a solid base for a redesigned garden with a new future.
Gardens, like life, can become cluttered, overgrown, stagnant, and unproductive. Some judicious weeding and thinning now and then breathes new life into a garden, once again giving it future options, a chance to become better at bridging the gap between urban and natural in meaningful thoughtful ways.
Photos in this series might be viewed with this overall idea in mind. My garden is an ongoing experience of living in a community of wild and domestic species constantly adapting to each other. I see this as something we are as urban humans, losing touch with today; this first hand experience of living in communities of wild things, including plants, animals, and the ever changing environment.
For most of us the days of having to live directly in contact with the wild natural environment have come to an end. We now find ourselves quickly accelerating away from living with Earth’s wild creatures into living lifestyles that often can and do cause great harm, even extinction to other species. The balance of life on this planet should be competition among living communities but never the willful destruction of other species or even individuals out of neglect and abuse.
Personally I find my path back to nature through my garden. Here are some images made this week in my garden. These are random shots taken while walking around the garden where I find something new and interesting almost every day.
Images are thumbnails, click for full size, then back button to return to this page.
Red Eye Flies
Red Eye Flies by the hundreds are spending warm afternoons feeding on fallen fruits of my Texas Sabal Palms - Sabal mexicana. When not feeding they rest on nearby leaves. Notice the eye size differences among individuals. Fortunately these flies don’t seem to be interested in anything but the rotting fruit.
Euphorbia geroldii flowers
Euphorbia geroldii is a semi-succulent shrub from Northeastern Madagascar. I might be described as a ‘thornless’ Crown of Thorns as it has no stem thorns like Euphorbia milii . It prefers shade, flowers most of the growing season, and likes moist soil. Flowers are about 3/4 inches wide and always in pairs. Even in mid-November, my plant is outside and in full bloom. Hardy to about 30 degrees. Highly recommended container plant for patio and garden.
Giant Red Powder Puff
The Giant Red Powder Puff - Calliandra haematocephalla, is native to Bolivia South America. Large 3 inch diameter flowers appear in winter months. Mine are blooming this month. My starter plant came from a sale at Moody Gardens. The first year it sat in the garden in a 5 gallon pot and rooted into the ground. That winter I brought it in where it promptly died from darkness and drying out. Out in the garden the severed root pieces sprouted new growth and now my plant is 7 feet tall and covered with bright red flowers. Sometimes it is better to just leave plants out in the cold than subject them to the stresses of moving inside.
Black Magic Elephant Ears
Black Magic Elephant Ears - Colocasia esculenta have spectacular large dusty solid purple-black leaves growing up to 2 feet long. Plants can be 5 feet tall. I have noticed during the hot growing season the leaves are often green with little or no purple. Soon as the weather cools, the color changes to the dark form. I grow mine in a deep saucer of standing water. (Keep BT Pellets - Bacillus thuringensis in standing pots of water to prevent mosquito infestations)
Bambusa oldhamii culm sheath
Giant Timber Bamboo - Bambusa oldhamii new culms shooting in November showing culm sheaths dropping. Bamboo has many beautiful subtle qualities. This is one of my favorites.
Neglected Oxalis thrives anyway!
This is an unusual Oxalis given to me by a friend. Grows well anywhere, specially nice in a full pot. Here a neglected pot of Oxalis is sprouting new leaves with the return of cool weather.
Painted Bamboo November Afternoon
Towering Painted Bamboo - Bambusa vulgaris ‘Vittata’ culms in the late afternoon sun of a November day. There are new culms shooting here also. This can be a problem when growing Painted Bamboo in a marginal climate as the new culm shoots do not harden off enough to withstand freezing weather. A chance I take to enjoy this spectacular giant tropical clumping bamboo.
Cypress Wetland Area November
After a long hot and dry summer, the Cypress Wetland Area comes to life with fall and winter rain. The leaves of the Bald Cypress will fall soon resulting in less demand for ground water. The vernal pond again fills up and usually stays that way until the trees leaf out again in spring. The sunny wetland has a community of plants and animals that have settled in together over the past 25 years to form a lush an stable ecosystem.
Cypress Wetland Area November
One specimen plant growing in the wetland area is a Majesty Palm - Ravenea rivularis. This is a wetland palm from Madagascar adapted to growing along the edges of rivers and creeks. It can happily stand in water for months without any damage. These palms thrive in wet conditions and often look sad planted in the center of a dry suburban lawn. Hardy to around 30 degrees f.
Contemplating Candel vs. LED/Solar Light
I have this dream of powering lighting and artworks in the garden with solar energy. As a start I recently acquired a set of LED/Solar stand alone garden lights from Sam’s. They were relatively inexpensive at $99 for a set of 18. That’s just $5.50 each and if anything I want more. They look fantastic in groups and in this case as the centerpiece of a patio table where the lens action of the container throws rays of bright white light across the table top but not into the eyes of those sitting around the table.
Well that’s it for this week, November 16 - 22, 2008. Just some slices of life from one Gulf Coast Garden.
Tags: Elephant Ear, Euphorbia geroldii, Flies, LED, Majesty Palm, Oxalis, Powderpuff, Red Eye Fly, Sabal mexicana, Solar, Wetland
Here are a few of my favorite bamboo videos found on the Net.
Sayang Kinabalu - Suara Buluh Perindu
Borneo Bamboo Orchestra (playing many bamboo instruments)
Traditional Music
Bamboo
Music By Karunesh, Album Zen Breakfast
Dramatic Viewpoint, It’s a Zen thing.
Periode Jurassique - Composition : Makoto YABUKI
Mostly Bamboo Insturments
Cambodian Bamboo Railway
Bringing transportation to the poor masses.
Bamboo, The Wonder Grass
Facts , more than you will ever need!
An India Indian Viewpoint.
Building Homes out of Bamboo in Hawaii
If you’re not yet sold on bamboo, this may change your outlook.
A commercial pitch for bamboo construction.
Tags: Bamboo, Multimedia, Music, Video
If you live in a Zone-9 climate zone and would like a dependable easy to grow clumping bromeliad for your patio pots or in ground planting, Cryptbergia rubra is a good choice. This is a fast growing dark red thin leafed clumping bromeliad that makes a great ground cover or companion accent plant for tropical potted plants. Mine have been in the ground here in Houston for over 20 years. Usually they make it through the winter with no freeze damage as they are hardy to the low 20’s.
Cryptbergia rubra - A hardy terrestrial bromeliad for zone-9 gardens
Clumps of this bromeliad can easily be divided by breaking apart new pups from the parent plants. Wait until the pups are at least 2/3 full grown for best success. Plant one division and soon you will have another dense clump. Soil is not a problem with Cryptbergias, they grow in almost any organic well drained soil mix. They don’t require much soil as they don’t have much of a root system as they also absorb nutrients through their leaves. I have seen clumps of Cryptbergia rubra happily growing nestled in the ‘Y’ of a Crepe Myrtle tree trunk. Usually though they prefer growing in loose soil.
Cryptbergia rubra - A hardy terrestrial bromeliad looks good in a container or in the ground.
The insignificant flowers are small and white with green bracts. Foliage is a rich wine red on top with a lighter silvery color beneath. Foliage color is most intense when the plants are growing in light shade.
Cryptbergia rubra is an intergeneric cross between two species of bromeliads, Billbergia nutans x Cryptanthus bahianus. Crosses between different genera in bromeliads are rare, a fact that adds interest to this unusual hardy bromeliad.
If you would like to purchase some starter plants of Cryptbergia rubra for your garden, contact me for details (see link at top of page). Pay with PayPal, shipped bareroot, continental US only. Thanks
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