Herself’s Houston Garden

Mercer is a place I often go visit, sometimes for classes, sometimes for plant sales, and sometimes just to wander about and take photos.

In the late 1940s, Thelma and Charles Mercer purchased a beautiful 14.5 acre tract of natural land along Cypress Creek. Thelma was an avid horticulturist, and she and Charles did much of the initial selective clearing to make space for some of her favorite native trees that included dogwoods, rusty black-haw viburnum, several species of hawthorns, plus many others. Thelma also planted large camellias that are still seen throughout the central gardens. She also introduced many other plant species, such as camphor, Ginkgo, Bauhinia, Philadelphus and tung oil that naturalized and are still growing beautifully.
When it came time for the Mercers to retire, they could not bear the thought of a developer bulldozing their paradise. So, in 1974, they convinced Harris County to purchase their original 14.5 acre tract with the stipulation that it would grow and be maintained as an educational and horticultural facility for the public.s enjoyment.

While attending the  Garden Blogger’s Spring Fling in Austin we visited the Lady Bird Johnson Gardens.

Lady Bird Johnson, our former first lady, and actress Helen Hayes founded an organization in 1982 to protect and preserve North America’s native plants and natural landscapes. First as the National Wildflower Research Center and later as the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, this special place exists to introduce people to the beauty and diversity of wildflowers and other native plants. Every day, the Wildflower Center brings life to Mrs. Johnson’s vision in its public gardens, its woodlands and sweeping meadows as well as in internationally influential research. In 2006, the Center became an Organized Research Unit of the University of Texas at Austin.

In April the garden holds a large sale of native plants.

While commonly lumped in with insects, at least in the minds of gardeners, snails and slugs are actually mollusks.  Yes, that is the family of clams, oysters and other shellfish.  This gives them their main weakness, which is they must remain damp.

During the day they hide, creeping out only at night or on cloudy days.  So your not likely to see them, just the damage they do to your plants.  Hostas, bird’s nest ferns and other plants of those types are favorite targets.  Leaves may be totally eaten.  You will find shiney silver trails left by these critters if you look closely at the remaining leaves.

Beer is your best option for control.  They love the yeast in the beer.  Put out a shallow bowl or a dinner plate and they will climb in, get drunk and not be able to escape. Another option is to put salt around the plants they are eating.  Copper is also toxic to critters in this family.

Oahu was very different than I expected.  I thought the whole island would look like it does on ‘Lost’ which is filmed there.  Instead there are dozens of tiny micro climates.  The mountains get 160″ of rain a year.  The rainfall drops 10″ for every mile you head away from the mountains.  So there were tropical rain forests all the way to desert climates.  Temperature is between 70′F-80F year round and day length only slightly varies.

I spent most of my time there hiking and most of my hiking was done in botanical gardens.  About half of the plants I saw are plants common to Houston.  It’s just the ones in Houston are about half as large as the ones in Hawaii.

Ficus trees are amazing. I’d only seen them indoors and what a difference outside. They are huge, some of the canopies were more than 100′ across. The roots drop down from all parts of the tree. When you get into a cluster of them you can believe you are in a Grimm brother’s fairy tale.

I was happy to note that they too grow their plants on sand, clay or some mix of the two. So I still have high hopes of turning my yard into a tropical jungle.

There was far less wildlife than I expected. No squirrels, instead they have mongooses. They slither by and you can hear them catch some poor unsuspecting bird. They were brought in to control mice and rats, but the mice and rats are nocturnal and the mongooses are not.

The birds we saw and heard the most were wild roosters and chickens. They are quite pretty and make the most amazing collection of sounds. Not at all like their tame cousins.

Almost all the wildlife is black, grey, white and bright red.

There are lots of notes with the plant photos, many of the plants you’ll recognize, many were truly strange.