Features

In the almost five years I’ve been writing this column, I have regularly been able to take pride in Dripping Springs athletes and their victories, thanks mainly to Mr. Carl Waits and his column in this newspaper.

This morning I was up early for me and could barely make out the plants outside but I saw the Superbells calibrachoas moving as if a ghost was in the midst. I knew immediately it was a Rubythroated hummingbird wasting no time in the daily feeding ritual. Despite the Proven Winners tag mentioning hummingbirds it has really been quite the surprise this season. They will visit each and every flower and color as well. I found it humorous that they would even spend what I would consider extra time on flowers that had lost their attractiveness. Makes me wonder if an older Superbells Tangerine Punch would age into a “Hummingbird Cabernet’. There have been a lot of other surprises with the Superbells, one being that I planted almost all of mine the first week of October. I planted a few extras here and there in April but my October surprise is something else. By the time you read this I will have had those 10 months. I’m not promoting them as perennials or eternals but I will tell you in my zone 8a garden they have been a lot tougher than I ever dreamed. I really believe that fall planting will become my regimen. Perhaps no bigger surprise has been the swallowtail butterfly’s frequent visits. It has mainly been Eastern Tiger Swallowtails and Spicebush Swallowtails making the daily nectar visits but our peak season is still to come. It stands to reason if hummingbirds feed, then the larger butterflies would too!

It’s no secret that Dripping Springs is a great spot to gaze at the Texas Hill Country skies. Beautiful night skies are celebrated here, and protected by the City’s Outdoor Lighting Ordinance. In 2014 the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) named Dripping Springs as the first International Dark Sky Community in Texas, and sixth in the world.