City Nature Challenge, Part 3 -- Plants

In the previous two posts I explained the general nature of the 2017 City Nature Challenge and listed some of the insect, reptile, fish, mammals, and amphibian observations we made during the five day period, April 14-18.  Now let me address plants.

Plants.  We had not spent much time considering plants when thinking about the City Challenge.  In fact, we were not even sure until the Challenge started that it included plants.  As it turned out, we got almost as many plants (66) as all of the different types of animals and insects combined (86).  However, it is also true that the percentage of unconfirmed identifications was higher for the plants than most of the other categories.  We were probably less interested in these than most of the categories, but still found some interesting things.

Little things in the "grass".  One of the things I learned from this project was the identity of some common weeds in grass.  I was familiar with white clover, violets, and dandelions, but some of the other things I had seen many times but could not name were black medick (what I would have called "yellow clover"), field madder (the weed with the tiny purple flowers), and common vetch (a plant with "mimosa-like" leaves that makes green and black bean pods).

black medick or hop clover

field madder

Common vetch that is taller since it has not been mowed

Trees.  Plants also of course include trees.  We are really bad at tree identification.  Some of the common ones are easy and we did get quite a few, but we were surprised at the many possible species choices for some types of trees.  Although we are not likely to encounter many of these, there are something like 35 species of oak trees in Texas.

What I identified merely as an oak, but what multiple people said was a post oak

Identification of trees is an area we are going to work on.  I am looking for good resources, but this site from TAMU seems like a good place to start.

Other "weeds".  We also saw lots of the other plants we had been encountering for years, especially while geocaching.  That included poison ivy, saw greenbrier (who knew there were 300-350 species of greenbrier!), Virginia creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, mustang grape, Southern dewberry (what I think of as "fake" blackberries), thistles (but what kind??), bastard cabbage, mesquite trees, prickly pear cactus, yuccas, bull nettle, wild onion, and milkweed (TPWD identifies 37 milkweed species in Texas!).

Wild onion, I think.  At least it smelled oniony

Green antelope horns, a type of milkweed.  The orange bugs are large milkweed bugs.

New things.  We did  encounter some brand new things, including common duckweed (maybe not really new, but I had been calling it pond scum), and arrowheads (an interesting marsh flower).

Common duckweed

What we identified as Delta Arrowheads

Wildflowers.  There were many other plants, but we were fortunate that the Challenge was in April because by far and away our favorite plants were the wildflowers which are in bloom this time of year.  I won't try to list them all, but some of the highlights include pinkladies, Texas paintbrush (what I would have called Indian paintbrush), wine mallow, Indian blanket, black-eyed susans, upright prairie coneflower (ummm....Mexican hat to most people), Texas vervain, Dakota mock vervain, blue-eyed grass, at least three types of daisies, and of course bluebonnets.

Pinkladies

Texas paintbrush and wine mallow

Indian blanket

Black-eyed susan

Mexican hat

Texas vervain

Dakota mock vervain

Blue-eyed grass

Ox-eye daisy?

Huisace daisy?

Arkansas lazy daisy

Bluebonnets

These were far from the best specimens of many of these flowers we had ever seen, but this was all about quantity of observations.  It was actually amazing the number of things we found within ten minutes of our house in this five day period.