Texas Native Plant Week in the garden

Texas Native Plant Week is sponsored each year by The Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center.  For 2016 it's October 16-22.   They'll have activities all week at the center, but I always start where any native plant fan would and that's right in my own garden with mostly native plants.  In our heat and dry-challenged climate it's so important to add native plants to the garden.  In Central Texas we are fortunate to have a wonderful variety of flowering and foliage native plants to choose from as in my tank garden photo below.  There are few non-natives but not many and even those are from nearby Mexico.

Throughout the week I'll post on some of my favorite native plants.  Today I'm highlighting Palafoxia, the delicate pink blooms in the foreground  I think this is probably Palafoxia callosa  or Small Palafox which I thought was too weedy to stay in the tank garden when it first appeared several years ago.

As a fall bloomer it doesn't look that great much of the summer.  All attempts to seed this fleeting annual to more natural parts of my garden have been unsuccessful and this year the Palafoxia has filled in enough to look less weedy.



Like many native plants Palafoxia needs little attention from the gardener and it gives back so much.  Butterflies and bees love it.  A Queen Butterfly (above and below) had to endure some buzzing bees to nectar on the delicate pink flowers.

Extremely heat and drought tolerant it adds so much to the fall garden.  Besides it has "fox" in the name so how could I go wrong?