Published in the McAllen Monitor, March 15, 2025
Story and photos by Anita Westervelt
Yellow blooms and sweet fragrance of native huisache trees, Acacia farnesiana, announce spring in the Rio Grande Valley.
There is an equally colorful show below those arching branches of blooms, especially off the beaten path around the countryside and in vacant city lots. Springing to life are springtime favorites – colorful plants perhaps not readily available at a local nursery, but faithful to the land and the season all the same – early nectar and pollen for emerging insects.
Bright yellow patches of tiny Tim, Thymophylla tenuiloba, hug the ground, making their appearance in early March and gone with the summer heat. The plant is multi-branched with small daisy-like flowers. It is native to Texas and northern Mexico and an excellent nectar and pollen source for bees and butterflies. The plant advances via runners and by seed.
Sand phacelia, Phacelia patuliflora, is always a treat to find. It seems to appear overnight and just as quickly disappear, so look quick, the purple clumps of blooms will be gone in a couple of weeks. The five-petaled purple flowers have a white center with white filaments and purple anthers, giving the flowers the appearance of a happy face. Locally known as sand scorpionweed and South Texas sand scorpionweed, it is an annual plant that grows from a taproot. It is especially attractive to native bees and numerous other insects during its short blooming life.
Pink colonies of pinkladies, Oenothera speciosa, also called Mexican primrose, populate slight swells of land in partial shade around the trunks of mature trees. Large groupings also thrive in full sun along roadsides. The four-petaled, cup-shaped flowers are striated with dark pink veins. The flower throat is yellow with green venation. The stigma is white and botanically described as deeply divided into four linear lobes, like crosshairs, leading butterflies to its nectar. The flowers begin opening at dawn and last only a day. They are a high nectar source for insects. Seed capsules are eaten by birds and small mammals. The plants go dormant in the heat of summer.
One of my favorite plants goes mostly unnoticed except by the numerous critters that use it. Adding palest greenish-white flower heads to the spring palette, Southern pepperweed, Lepidium austrinum, feeds bees, butterflies and birds. It has an interesting botanical description in that the stems are considered long strings of siliques: long, narrow seedpods (fruit) of many plants of the Brassicaceae (cabbage) family where growth below the flowers is often mistaken for a row of leaves. The seedpods split open spontaneously when mature, releasing the seeds. Leaves are a rosette at the base of the stem. It is a host plant for the great Southern white butterfly.
The March 17 presentation at the South Texas Border Chapter Texas Master Naturalist meeting is about Owls, by chapter member Texas Master Naturalist John McKee. The presentation begins at 6:30 p.m. at St. George Orthodox Church Hall, 704 West Sam Houston, in Pharr. Meetings are free and open to the public.