The following update on the native wildflower gardens in West 11th Street Park is provided by FWESP board member and Texas Master Naturalist Wallace (Wally) Ward.
West 11th Street Park has spawned native wildflowers since I first became involved in the park in 2004. At first, I began gardening on the southeast and south sides of the Park. In Spring 2005 I joined the board of FWESP, and in 2007 began serious native-plant gardening there to attract butterflies, native bees, moths, beetles, and other pollinators.
We had acquired the Park property from HISD in 2007 under the leadership of the late Lorraine Cherry and deeded the property to Houston Parks & Recreation Department to be a wilderness park in perpetuity. With the City's installation of an irrigation system in the garden on the southeast side of the Park, we began gardening in earnest. At the same time, we sowed a grassy strip along the south side of the Park with wildflower seeds and seedballs.
At this time I have planted and shall continue to plant wildflower seedlings in plug trays and cellpacks I have seeded myself. I anticipate having hundreds of wildflower plants blooming later this season. These wildflower plantings over the years have brought in many types of pollinating insects, although insecticide spraying by the City and private-property owners seem to have diminished the numbers and diversity of pollinating insects.
Near the corner of West 11th St. and Shelterwood Dr., there is a small garden space that needs work to remove last year's overgrowth of Bidens alba, a weedy wildflower that takes over without management, although its flowers have attracted a large variety of pollinators to the Park over time. Since the water oak now overshadowing the bed is so wide, I have seedlings of shade-tolerant Texas wildflowers from Native American Seed Co ready to go as soon as the bed is cleared out. These include Wine Cup, Black-Eyed Susan, Scarlet Sage, and Camphor Daisy. I’ve also planted 104 small plugs of the same wildflowers in a line along the back of the main garden bed behind and extending west to a trailhead into the Park interior and including a mounded bed comprising Stop 17 of the Wireless Wilderness tour. In that mounded bed I have installed over 100 young partridge pea plants, which attract native bees to their blooms later in the summer, including a beautiful, small, metallic-green sweet bee. We also see bee flies nectaring; they resemble bees to discourage predators and are good examples of Batesian mimicry.
Further back a few feet along the path into the woods are numerous plants of young blue mist flower, which tolerate shade and which are nectaring favorites of Fall-migrating Monarch butterflies and other pollinators. They will start blooming in late Spring. One can also see several Tropical Sage plants now in bloom on the east side of the trail headed back a short distance north into the margin of the woods. One September I watched a migrating hummingbird nectar at the red Sage flowers, so I collected the seeds and maintained a dense planting through the summer and earlier Fall. In addition, there are Indian Blanket flowers in bloom now behind and a little to the west of the park bench, planted a few years ago by Daisy Scouts who installed the seedlings.
At this time the most floriferous bed is the one on the south side of the Park along the sidewalk along West 11th St. about 400 feet west of Shelterwood Rd. The bed is full of Mexican Hat, with smaller numbers of Indian Blanket, Lemon Mint, Bluebonnets, and other natives. In mid-April I watched a Common Buckeye butterfly resting atop one of the Clover flowers now in bloom. I have also seen Monarch butterflies visiting the Park looking for nectar and their caterpillar host plants, the various milkweed species. We are short of mature milkweed plants right now, but I have strong seedlings of over 100 Butterfly Weed (Asclepias tuberosa) and around 35 Swamp Milkweed seedlings (A. incarnata) which I shall move into the Park hopefully before this article reaches Timbergrove residents. The milkweed flowers will provide nectar to many pollinators through midsummer. They die back before the Fall Monarch migration.These milkweed plants also will return next year in late winter and will be large enough during Monarch spring migration out of Mexico to provide feedstock to lots of Monarch caterpillars.
Beware of Mexican milkweed sold by the nursery trade: It is an alien plant to this area and often will persist through the winter, distracting southbound Monarchs that should be proceeding to Mexico without laying eggs along the way. Mexican Milkweed plants from dealers often have been treated with systemic pesticides by wholesalers to prevent Monarch caterpillars from taking hold and disfiguring the plants. In addition, overwintering Mexican Milkweed hosts OE disease, which can compromise the survival of any unlucky Monarch caterpillars that feed upon it. Also search around in the grassy open areas of the Park for the blue, three-petaled flowers of Herbertia, dandelion-like flowers of the native multiple-stemmed False Dandelion (it also festoons fields and roadsides after heavy rains and can be seen along the banks of the rise to the bridge over the Eureka Springs railyard on T.C. Jester), and other wildflowers that grow in the south border of the wooded part of the Park.