January 2015 - Wildlife Wednesday

The first in a series always garners a little extra pressure to captivate, entertain and inform, and even though this is not my first Wildlife Wednesday post ever, it is the kickoff for an entirely new calendar year, so I have been feeling a bit panicked.

You see, with some fairly chilly overnight temperatures in play recently it looked like all I'd be writing about was a No-Wildlife Wednesday.  Over and over I bundled up and went out roaming with my camera.  It was just me and the plants, one of us grumpily thinking that it being too hot outside maybe wasn't really so awful.  Because with the exception of a few pretty tiny gauzy flying thingies caught in the sunlight one afternoon, it felt pretty much like I was the only thing moving around outside.

Which is, of course, utter nonsense.  You are never, ever alone in a garden. Easily visible to the casual observer or not, the garden beds, landscaped areas, heck, even the potted plants and the lawn are absolutely teeming with life all year around.

Some of that life, of the stomping chomping pooping variety, is agreeably harder to overlook than the little bitties.

But this time of year?  Large or small, life in the wild is playing out under protective cover and while that makes it all that much harder to capture the action on camera, it is impossible to deny.

In every nook and cranny, every day, hot or cold or wet or dry, something with a mouth makes gardening a little more challenging, a little less predictable.

And complain as I will, learning about those very same mouthy critters keeps the practice of gardening, at least for me, not only a lot more interesting, but a lot more fun.

I am so regularly astonished and delighted by what I discover.

For example, recently while doing a little sleuthing to finally put the name to a succulent I've grown for years without knowing what it was called, I ran across a statement about the plant growing in its native setting that stopped me in my tracks.

The succulent, which I have growing in multiple settings, is called Portulacaria afra.  There are several varieties with different sizes, leaf and stem colors. They all tumble delightfully over edges and feature lovely little round leaves that contrast beautifully with the rosettes and spikes of other succulents.

Portulacaria afra serves as the ideal "spiller" component in any thriller/filler/spiller combination for dish gardening.  It is easy to propagate (in fact try and stop it) as any branch that breaks off will rapidly develop an independent root system.  I just love the stuff.

The particular variety I found is low growing, Portulacaria afra prostrata, and while that is fun to speak aloud, sounding quite a bit like a sorcerer's spell, it was the so-called common name for this little garden workhorse that really grabbed me.  In South Africa where the plant originates, Portulacaria afra in all its growth forms is simply called "Elephant Food".

Ponder that for a moment.  As much as we Central Texan gardeners gritch and moan about the ongoing assaults various bugs, raccoons and even white tail deer mount on the plants growing in our unfenced spaces, the idea that a plant would be acknowledged by its very name to face destiny as elephant food? Well, that was sobering.

I tried to imagine the rigors of gardening in the company of not just any hungry herbivore, but one that must eat enough to support a body the size of a minivan.  All at once, my perspective shifted.  I realized I am grateful, deeply grateful, to "only" have deer at the top of our local munching chain.  

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That's my post for Wildlife Wednesday this January.  To avoid any confusion, the photos above are all my own, but were taken in months when the temperatures outside were well above our current January chill.

Thanks as always to Tina at My Gardner Says for hosting, and to you for stopping by.  I hope you'll join the fun this month and link your post to hers on her site in the Wildlife Wednesday comments section.

And while I'm at it - Happy 2015 to us all - large, small and in-between!