A Garden Blogger's Bird Day

This post, "A Garden Blogger's Bird Day", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.

Okay, it's not really one day... it took a couple of weeks. And there aren't that many birds, but if I wait any longer to add photos the leaves will be falling.

In the middle of July a very striking rusty orange & black bird began appearing at the fountain - but I had no camera. He kept appearing while we borrowed a camera, purchased one, returned it and bought another and I kept trying to catch my pretty bird visitor with no success. Then a couple of weeks ago our son was standing at the window with the new camera, experimenting with the settings, when the small bird appeared and posed. Showing us not only the rusty orange front but the striped feathers, too. Using links from local blogger Mikael at Birding on Broadmeade, I've tentatively identified the bird as an Orchard Oriole. The photos of the female at the link resembled a bird I'd been seeing, but thought was a female Lesser Goldfinch. I'm still not sure, but this bird has a beak more like an oriole than a goldfinch, so I think it's the female Orchard Oriole. I delayed posting the photos my son took, hoping for a chance to show the pair. Both male and female appear off and on and I finally took a couple of not-so-hot photos of what might be his missus through the window. Unfortunately that window is double pane glass and it's got moisture trapped between the panes. - replacing the windows is on our "must be done" list!

Both birds have been around this week, too. Since these sightings were spread out over three months, I think there must be some source of the fruit and pollens that they need nearby. The hummingbirds remain elusive - instantly leaving the yard if I so much as peek out any door. So I'm trying to entice them closer to the window. A month ago I used twine to make an arch from the crook of a shepherd hook near the fountain up to a large 'S'-shaped hanger attached under the eaves outside the breakfast room window. Then I trained the cypress vine along it - knowing how much those hummingbirds like the little red trumpets. Maybe some day I'll get lucky. And yes... I do know there will be a million cypress vine seedlings next spring. These were some of the million seedlings from this spring!
The Blue Jays pose so often that they're on my blog banner and in this photo from May. But most of the birds I see all day long - sparrows, wrens, housefinches and White-Winged Doves - are so common, and at the same time so jumpy - that I seldom attempt to photograph them.

Iris at Society Garlic once mentioned that she wasn't even sure what a White-winged dove looked like so yesterday I stalked them. They're Baby Huey birds - nervous and clumsy when landing next to each other and scattering if a leaf falls off a tree. This dove landed on the old bird bath, far enough away from the back door that it let me take a photo. I've read that twenty years ago these White Winged Doves were rather rare birds in the Austin area, found mainly in the Rio Grande Valley. We never saw them around our previous Austin house, less than 2 miles from here, but our present neighborhood is thick with these birds and their cooing call of "Who cooks for you?" Another common bird soars high overhead, too far away for good photographs - My new camera takes such large photos that I can clip that tiny dot and enlarge it into something that's at least recognizable as a vulture.

Cooing is one way that birds talk to each other...twittering is another. Look in the left sidebar and you'll see that I'm trying out Twitter as a way to communicate. It took Hurricane Ike to convince me to join after wavering for months. With Houston area friends in danger, I could read Twitter updates to follow the storm and then felt enormously relieved when bloggers sent messages via Twitter. There was a comfort in that connection! And tweets are faster than making posts if you have a quick thing to say.

The Moonflower vine in the last post got so many compliments that I may have to include a different photo of it every post! FaireFrances has been having fun photographing her moonflowers, too.

This picture is a genuine "point and shoot"... the point of the metal obelisk is 7 and 1/2 feet tall, and I'm about 5' 6". So I couldn't focus and aim...all I could do was hold the camera way over my head and point it at the flower while pressing the shutter button.


Before leaving bird day let's look at this close-up of a Stapelia flower. My collection comes from one plant given to me by my aunt Phyll long ago. A small descendant of that first plant bloomed in the laundry room this week, pressing its flower against the window as it developed, deforming the edges. I'd hoped the heart of the Starfish Flower would resemble one of the flower Mandalas that Healing Magic Hands finds everywhere. But I'm not sure this heart qualifies as a Mandala ... it looks as if belongs to zoology rather than botany. Am I the only one who instead of feeling centered, had a sudden mental image of Robin Williams?


This post, "A Garden Blogger's Bird Day", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.

Adding A Water Feature

This post, "Adding A Water Feature", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.

Are any of you Social Garden Shoppers? I sure am - happily volunteering when a friend wants company on a trip to a nursery or garden center. What's not to like? Wandering the aisles while talking to another gardener is one of my favorite things! Sometimes I find supplies or a few plants and sometimes I just look and think and dream.

I'd been up to Cedar Park's Hill Country Water Gardens with Philo a few times, looking and dreaming, then last summer I tagged along when a couple of other gardeners wanted to go there. On each visit I found myself gravitating to the same area of the display yard and my dreaming found a focus.

A few weeks ago Philo & I went back to HCWG - not to look, but to buy. This place is fun to wander, with large demonstration ponds, plants, fish, pottery, all kinds of fountains, fun garden art and water-work supplies fanned out for the visitor. They arrange for installation or give advice to those who want to do the work themselves.

I threaded my way back to the stone fountain bases and showed Philo the one that had been calling my name.

At Hill Country Water Gardens we met a very knowledgeable guy named Nicholas. He told us that this interesting stone came from Lueders, Texas. Then he explained the process of making a base into a fountain and we made decisions - delivery or take-with, tub size, the pump, concrete blocks and screens. He went for a forklift and soon the parts were ready to load.

We could have had the stone delivered but my old car has hauled heavy garden supplies and plants for years. Philo decided it could carry the block of Lueders Stone. The door opening was a tight fit but the guys made it work. Our son was glad to help unload the stone once we had it home.

The block sat on the sidewalk for days while I reworked the patio area. We planned to install the fountain in the decomposed granite area right outside the breakfast room window. Some pots and troughs needed to move aside and a lot of self-sown fennel had to be pulled out.

Swallowtail butterflies lay eggs on fennel so I'd let it grow wherever it sprouted for a couple of years. We liked seeing the larvae, but the fennel's shadow was killing sun-loving herbs like thyme, and the space was needed for something else now. (Don't worry about future generations of Swallowtail larvae - I've established a second patch of fennel in the long fence border and have young plants in containers.)

While I puttered with pots, Philo measured and planned. He tacked together a depth gauge from pieces of wood, a useful tool for knowing how to dig the hole for the black plastic reservoir tub. He sketched and took notes and made a cardboard template of the base.

I did not want to rush this part - wouldn't a Dress Rehearsal be a good idea? Philo dollied the burlap-cushioned, heavy stone to the spot we'd chosen. We thought we knew which side should face the house, but wanted to look at it from the patio, from the walk, and through the window before we started to dig. Even without water we really liked looking at that stone!

We needed rocks to hide the black plastic tub and screen - Nicholas told us to check out Jacobs Stone and Landscaping , a wonderland of building materials where we found a medium-size mix of Texas river rocks that we liked. We only needed a few 5-gallon buckets and shoveled them ourselves, reusing 5-gallon sacks from our previous expeditions for compost and decomposed granite to tote them home.

(The story of how we extended our standard rectangular concrete patio by using thick layers of pea gravel and decomposed granite is told in this 2006 post. )

We wanted to save and reuse those layers, so once the stone was moved out of the way, Philo spaded up the gravel onto a screen made to fit across the garden cart. The larger gravel that stayed on top of the screen was scooped into more of our handy sacks and the smaller stuff scooped from the bottom of the cart went into separate sacks.

With the good stuff cleared, he then started on the black heavy clay underneath. He dug and I hauled the soil away with the wheelbarrow, returning to use the Cobra head tool to pry out rocks when he hit them.

It took a long time to get that hole dug, use the depth gauge, get out rocks, add back finer screenings as a base for the tub, level and readjust the base and that tub moved in and out of place a number of times.

I'm not going to detail the fun with concrete blocks or fitting the pipe and motor or describe the access hatch Philo constructed - each installation will be different. The gravel and granite were packed in around the black tub.

The most nerve-wracking part came next - it took strength to move over three hundred pounds of solid rock across gravel or concrete, but now Philo and our son needed precision as well as strength.

They used the dolly and boards, getting the heavy stone up over the lip and onto the plastic grate with the concrete supports underneath.

We filled the reservoir and watched the water come out the top, then I started adding the rocks, hiding the black plastic.

The rock placement has already changed and evolved, and they'll be moved again for cleaning or possibly raccoons will rearrange them. Maybe rocks from other places will be added by visitors.


One recent visitor found out that adding and subtracting rocks where the water emerges from the rock results in different sounds and sprays, and she also improved the arrangement of the rooks at the base.



We can now sit at the table, listening to the peaceful water sounds of our dream-turned-real. Appropriately for a place called Circus~Cercis, the name of this kind of water feature implies that it performs a trick -
Ladies and Gentlemen...presenting for your amusement...

the Disappearing Fountain!

This post, "Adding A Water Feature", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.