Rewilding My Lot

For two months in September and October we had no rain, and then two inches fell at the beginning of November. That one rainfall triggered a mass germination of seeds that were in the soil here. Some of those seeds may be weedy things that were already in the ground before I got here, but I am confident that many are from native wildflowers that grew last season.

Last year I planted Texas Bluebonnet (Lupinus texensis) seeds in the front yard as part of a seasonal wildflower meadow. I didn’t have very high hopes for the first year, thinking I’d just get a handful of plants. In fact, there were dozens. This year, the number of leaf rosettes that I see coming up is in the hundreds or even thousands! They are so close together that I don’t expect every one to develop into a full sized plant — the plants themselves will decide what density they want. This makes me very excited to see what the meadow will look like next spring!

Some of the new seedlings already are developing the second, mature leaf shape, which follows the initial round leaf pair.

The newly planted Mexican Buckeye tree has many Bluebonnet companions. This is an instance when I will probably thin out the Bluebonnets myself in order to give the tree more space, but for now I’ll just watch to see what happens over the winter.

Most of the photos in this post were taken in the front wildflower meadow, but there is also a lot of seed germination happening in the back yard (photo below).

Apart from Bluebonnets, which I can recognize, I don’t know yet what the other seeds are that are germinating (they are the smaller ones in the photo below). There are plenty of them, though! The most likely candidates, given the timing, are Firewheel aka Indian Blanket (Gaillardia pulchella).