Neverending rain; Boerne Native Plant Society
named Chapter of the Year

By Bebe and Sissy Fenstermaker

December and it’s still raining. We are past 70 inches since July. It’s colder, winter is very close. There would have been fine color this year except it rained and water is not conducive to color in plants. It frays the edges of expected flowers, too. The roses have grown about a foot and a half since July but the production of blooms is down. Lots of nitrogen, not enough phosphorus and potassium. The cattle lie down often. The grass is probably over their heads in some places. The horses have gained a lot of weight. The other day our farrier insisted we have them tested for thyroids out of control. We did and they are just fine; it’s only nature’s overabundance.
For someone who grew up in the drought of the 1950s this weather is hard to grasp. I don’t think well in humidity and certainly not on days of constant downpour. Every evening I look at pictures of deserts and high barren plains to keep my sanity. It is important to know there are still places where the sun shines.
I planted a swiss chard in the garden. It looked so pretty with yellow and rosy stems and I looked forward to greens this winter. It and the huge artichoke complemented each other. By the next day the chard stems were history, fallen either to desperado deer or chickens. The 17 fighting hens that were a gift probably did it. They are a hard-bitten lot. They grew up in the city and have not gotten any country ways. The first evening that I let them out to wander, they thought getting up on the buggy tongue would do for a roost. I had to get a stick to get them down and into the chicken house. The old coon would have loved to give them a "taste" of country ways that night. They often have fits trying to roost in the evenings because the three guinea hens pursue them. How that many chickens are buffaloed by only three guineas is beyond me. They are a flighty group, exploding into the air. I hear squawks followed by booms as I go down to the house. A guinea has pecked and the chicken has hit the chicken house walls. It goes on until black dark. Not one of them has laid an egg yet.
Bubba and Pepita, the little blue game banty chickens, live in the coop down at the house. Pepita is a lovely mannered thing, still missing her big friend the "pecking" chicken. Bubba is a handful. Very personable like Pepita, his ideas are unfettered by size. He thinks he ought to be in charge of all hens on the Ranch. If the chickens are not let out for the day, Bubba struts all the way up to the top of their wire pen to crow. Funny in itself, it is also crazy dangerous. Just the other day I chased a hawk out of the chicken house (he, too, was an idiot -- they were out for the day). Bubba also tempts any coyote that might be observing from the back road. I’ve pointed this out to him each time I grab him down from the pen and haul him back to the yard. In the evening, the ruckus and howling in the chicken house is either guinea wars or Bubba beating up the three big roosters. The tiny hothead corners all the hens and has the roosters looking for cover.
As soon as we got into November the weather improved. The fall color trees are decorating the hills and the days begin crisply. We scheduled and achieved a day of riding last week. Eleanor of the mules trailered her horse over and we had a wonderful day. At lunch, we had a surprise. Taz, the blue heeler, made a rush at something on the porch that turned out to be an enormous lizard. It flicked a beautiful blue tongue at us and hissed when we caught it in a basket. None of us had ever seen this species. It was light reddish-brown with band of lighter dots all the way down its body. It seemed rather slow and tame so we assumed it was an exotic someone had dumped. We took it over to Wally at Primarily Primates, assuming he would receive another exotic, and he did. All his employees marveled over it but no one could identify it. It had been through some tough times because it had lost a front leg and was in the process of regenerating its tail. Wally just loved it and took it into the house to feed it; he said he had plenty of mealy worms on hand -- what a guy. The next day he called to say that one of his board members had told him to check to see if the lizard might be the Texas Alligator Lizard. I looked it up in a reptile book and behold, it was. It is one of our natives. (Of course, we are the exotics.) I am still marveling that in all the years we have climbed the hills and trailed the creeks, I have never seen this animal. It is fairly rare, slow-moving, carnivorous, and ten to 20 inches long, not a small thing. As lizards go around here, it is pretty big! Wonders never cease; the Ranch always provides education, fascination, and humbling experiences. Our whole neighborhood is thrilled. I think we will name it Primarily Maverick, the Texas Alligator Lizard.

Bebe Fenstermaker

What a surprise the Boerne Native Plant Society got at the annual meeting in Houston. We were chosen "Chapter of the Year" and awarded $200 because our membership showed the highest percentage of increase for the year. Needless to say, our collective heads were in the clouds at the next meeting. It has been a busy year for the chapter, as well as one of satisfaction. We began a new activity involving the area nurseries called Project NICE (Natives Instead of Common Exotics). Each month a native plant is selected that will replace specific exotics in a landscape. The native is featured at the nurseries and the chapter furnishes them with details about the plants along with planting and care instructions for their customers. It has been a successful project and we have received inquiries from other chapters.
Our newsletter editor began writing a column about native plants and related issues for the local papers in Boerne. It has been such a success he was asked to continue writing. The chapter’s last activity for the year was to invite Jill Nokes, landscaper and noted author (How to Grow Native Plants of Texas and the Southwest), to be a featured speaker. The Community Center was packed that evening for what turned out to be an informative and quite humorous talk. The audience was mainly from the Boerne area but drew from Fredericksburg and San Antonio as well.
We closed our year with a Christmas party that included a plant identification quiz. The host, a "retired" geology professor, just couldn’t leave us in peace. No one identified all the plants correctly, but the winner did receive the prize, what else but a native plant. The chapter’s crack plant rescuer still disputes the identity of one of the plants on the quiz. Was it a soapberry or a flame leaf sumac?

Sissy Fenstermaker