It's Time For Another Round of What's! That! Plant!

No, seriously, what the hell is this?

Here it is on my desk at work, planted in some plastic cups.   I liberated it from the landscaping.

NO, I didn't STEAL it from the landscaping - it was a "volunteer" plant, not supposed to be there, not a single other one on the building grounds.  It would have been cut down by the landscapers, if they ever bother to show up again.

Soft, floppy leaves with serrated edges.  Medium, regular, plain-ol' green.  No fuzz or hairs or spikes or anything.

Nothing interesting on the undersides, either.

Pairs of opposite leaves;  the pairs alternating from each other.  I don't know what that's called.

There's some axillary budding here - it looks like they're going to be more leaves?  But I can't tell yet.

Also the stems are a bit...not really fuzzy...they look almost as if they've been dipped in very fine sugar.  But it doesn't look like something that's happened to the plant, it looks natural to it.

There are new branches/leaves sprouting opposite each other, from the "trunk" of the plant;  as well as bark forming on the lower/oldest portions of the trunk and branches.


At first I thought this was a Hydrangea, but I'm confident it's not.  When I looked into trees, I thought maybe a Texas Ash...but it's not.

What IS this?










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No Groundhogs In Texas

People up north have Punxatawney Phil, that odd-looking round beast who pokes his head up in February to see if it's still too cold to go outside, or if the sun is finally out.

'Round these parts we hide on our screened porches and our fan-cooled solars, sipping iced tea, and long about this part of the year, one of us walks out to the yard for a sec, to see if it's still 105º goldurned degrees out.

Okay, so, maybe it's not quite that romanticized.  In fact, August is basically "Fuck Texas Month," at least for everyone I know.  You can forget trying to get anything done in the yard, for damn sure.  But now that it's September, and temperatures are finally only in the upper nineties, life resumes:

The front garden lives! Yay!  -1 lavender

Look, I got plants for the baskets on the front porch, finally!!   (variegated Lilyturf
(Liriope), and some Vincas to trail downwards; both on clearance for $1/plant) 

Love!  I hope I remember to water them this time.  I'm
horrible with these baskets. 

Experiment: two tall silver florist's buckets as cachepots - love it, but not
HERE.  I ended up moving them in front of the garage, at opposite sides.
The Sansivierras came from a $5, 3-gallon "plant" which actually held like
seven or eight individual plants.  So I split them up into these two buckets,
a pot on the front porch, and a pot for the house.  

One of the other Sans, along with my Jade Plant,
and an extra Lilyturf that I forgot to plant. 

Over the weekend I also mowed the grass, trimmed back a huge rosemary bush, and trimmed up all of my trees to get rid of suckers and low-hanging branches, including the oak in the front yard.  Pics of that, and stuff in the backyard, later this week.  :)


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