ranchmagazine.com

By Jake Landers
Published February 2011

Coralberry is an attractive vine with bright red berries that I usually use in Thanksgiving and Christmas decorations, when I get around to it, and when it’s been a good berry producing year. Often the vines on fences and in thickets provide only bright green leaves and no berries for decorations, but some years the berries put on quite a show.

Many years ago on the ranch I would bring in a colorful strand which Mom would use to decorate the fireplace mantle or the dining room dinner table. It was my job in those days to wander along the field fence and in the high-fenced Turkey Trap to look for unfamiliar plants, fancy rocks, arrowheads, wild animals, or just about anything. Buffalo gourds and Milkweed pods were occasionally brought in and usually rejected for decorations. But the red berries were well received.

By Jake Landers
Published January 2012

It really doesn’t smell as bad as you might think from its name.  Another name for it is Perfume Bush.  If beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, then fragrance is in the nose of the smeller.  After all, the faint odor of a skunk is pleasing to some people.  The odor of Skunkbush to me is tolerable, not perfumy, and distinct enough to identify on a dark night or blindfolded when you smell a crushed leaf.

By Jake Landers
Published October 2011

Four or five days after a summer rain of an inch or more, expect to see Rain Lilies pop up in lawns, roadsides and parks where the grass has not felt the ultimate manicured care. In some local grassy landscapes there are so many it is hardly possible to take a step without crushing a white flower in full bloom. In less than a week the flowers are gone, replaced by a withering stalk with a 3-parted capsule of jet-black seeds, flat and shaped like the letter “D.” If the rain persists, the seeds may scatter to start a new plant; if not, the seeds are lost, and the mother plant retreats into its underground bulb to await the next summer rain. It’s a good way to survive a drought.

How does it do it? Where are the green leaves that take energy from the sun to replace the energy in the bulb that it took to grow the flower? Is it a parasite that gets its nourishment from its neighbors like the Indian paintbrush? 

By Jake Landers
Published September 2011

You would think that I would have something better to do than to drive along the Texas highways looking at the scenery.  The problem is, I must get from one place to another for various reasons, and the scenery is there whether or not I look at it.  I seldom purposely drive to look at the scenery as I might more often do in the Colorado Rockies or along the Pacific seashore, but I do enjoy seeing the  Texas countryside even if I’ve seen it many times before.

Observing and trying to understand what you see out the window while you drive is what I call “Reading the Landscape”.  Multiple questions arise as the patterns change from cultivated fields of cotton and milo to pastures dominated by Mesquite.  Why is the land cultivated here and not there?  It must be the soil.  Why is this landowner just now converting Mesquite pasture to cultivation by root plowing, stacking and burning the Mesquite and other brush?  Good question, but it can’t be answered from the highway.   Why is Pricklypear cactus so abundant here and not there?  And on it goes.