Surprise! I’ve got a biology bonus post for ya’ll. It doesn’t pair with tomorrow’s Flora and Fauna post at all but it was too cool not to share.
Last Friday out at the Hutchinson House, I noticed something strange poking through the brush pile in the front field. There was a Crape-Myrtle blooming in the middle of it! The strangest part about that is there was never a Crape-Myrtle planted in that spot. It was a regularly disked and bush-hogged field before we acquired the property. When the EIOLT began cleaning up around the Hutchinson House we piled the woody debris we cleared in the middle of the field, so it would be out of the way of construction and could eventually be disposed of. Last fall, we cleared a strip out in from of the house so the footers for the cover could be poured and the boom lifts would have level ground to work on. On the far end of that strip was a large Crape-Myrtle stump that had been choked by Chinese Wisteria until it was just barely clinging to life. The inside of the stump was totally rotten and what was left of the tree was too far gone to make a proper recovery. So we had it removed and it ended up in the brush pile with the other debris. Eight months later, that same nearly dead stump, ripped out of the ground and left in a pile in the middle of a hot sandy field, is not only still alive but doing well enough to bloom! On top of that, what’s left of its old root system is putting out shoots where the stump was torn out. You just can’t kill a Crape-Myrtle.
