Wildflower Weekend.

not much gardening going on this past week or weekend, just some maintenance weeding. however, darin and i did make a weekend trip to see wildflowers. i've lived in texas for ten years now, but i'd never before driven out to "see the bluebonnets" which can be found not-so-far from houston.

so, after much delay, we got out of houston about 10:30 saturday morning, heading northwest on hwy 290. the texas highway department's wildflower website and hotline had told us that the bluebonnets were heavy in the brenham area. indeed, we saw a great number of bluebonnet patches, interspersed with indian paintbrush and a yellow flower i didn't recognize. lots and lots of flowers. the combination of royal blue, orange and yellow is very, very attractive.

after a detour (pilgramage) to the home of blue bell ice cream, we made our way towards austin, drove along the north side of lake travis and ended up in fredericksburg. but before getting quite to fredericksburg, we stopped at wildseed farms.

i highly recommend a visit to wildseed farms. they have a great setup with a huge selection of live plants, seeds and gardening decor in their market center. and you can walk around their fields and see whatever is in season. this weekend they had acres upon acres of bluebonnets. even though you can't actually walk through the fields (there are very pleasant walkways between the growing areas), the sheer number of flowers is awfully impressive.

after wandering through the flowers, we headed for the fredericksburg winery. (the wine is better than the website.) dinner was at the silver creek restaurant on main street - very tasty german fare. finally, we headed west again in search of lodging. the original plan had been to rough it in our tent at a campsite, but we started seeing lots of lightning during dinner and decided a real roof overhead was in order - next time we'll remember to check the forecast before heading out. nothing was available in kerrville, so we ended up an hour further west, near segovia.

this morning we took the scenic route to lost maples state natural area. darin had been here a few weeks ago on a motorcycle ride and really wanted to take me on a particular hike. it was a fairly short hike - but steep - up to the top of a ridge for a scenic overlook. the view was well worth it. and down was much easier. roundtrip was ~1.5 hours.

after that we were pretty well "scenic-ed" out and headed back to houston.

all in all, a good trip, though a bit long. never having gone wildflower watching before, i can't compare what we saw to previous years or other routes, but it was definitely worthwhile and i'll make darin take me again next year.