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In 1817 the pirate Jean Lafitte settled on Galveston Island and, under the protection of the Mexican flag, continued his harassment of Spanish ships in the Gulf. He built a fort on the island that included his home, the Maison Rouge (red house). The windows in the upper story of the house were designed for cannon and the downstairs was furnished with treasures from captured ships. When he left the island in 1821, he burned the house and the surrounding fort and sailed to Mexico. In 1870, another residence was built over the foundation and cellars of Lafitte’s home. That residence is now also gone, leaving behind parts of walls, stone stairs, weeds, and vines.

Every day hundreds of cars go by the site without any idea of its history. Flanked by a biolab and a welding shop, the evidence of the lot’s past is fenced in by both wire and vegetation. In the right light, however, there is the sense that the pirate’s spirit is still hanging around his old home and there is a certain eeriness in the ruins.

A year has passed since Ike hit Galveston and I have been busy repairing my house and trying to save the remnants of a garden saturated with salt and heaven knows what else. I tried planting a little of this and a little of that to see what would survive and was so pleased to find that most of my efforts were successful. In spite of heat and drought and humidity and lots and lots of bugs (and birds to eat the bugs along with the eggplant and peppers — a balanced diet), there was a lot of beauty out there. Here are some samples.

This Pavonia just showed up near a drain spout and has been blooming all summer.

I lost every leaf of my passion flower vine to Gulf Fritillary caterpillars, but I don’t know which was more lovely — the vine or the orange butterflies that filled my yard after they immerged from their cocoon.

My oxblood lilies survived not only the water but also a bleach rinse of the house before it was repainted.

The nasturiums did beautifully, although I put them in a pot. This month, however, I noticed they were popping up anew throughout my daylily bed.

These are not the naked ladies of my youth (these have leaves when they come into bloom) but they are very similar. I’m trying to track down the correct name. [Feb. 14, 2010 — This is a crinum, exact variety unknow.]

The old cemetery on Broadway sent up its usual display of thousands of coreopsis and a few Mexican blankets to set a cheerful note in an incongruous setting.

The pride of Barbados is also in a pot because after I bought it I found out it would grow too large for any empty spot in my yard. That didn’t stop it from blooming magnificently, however.

The Banksia rose really looked bad over the winter, but in the spring it began to bloom, first a little here and then a little there until it was almost 80% back to its normal cascade of yellow.

Here’s another shot of the cemetery. I’m surprised there are not traffic accidents along Broadway when its in bloom.

UPDATE: This was written before Hurricane Ike hit Galveston head-on. The waves were nowhere as calm as the photo above but the statue shown below survived.  

I have lived in quite a few states, all of which had their resident natural disasters. I have experienced earthquakes, floods, and – from a distance – tornados. But there is something different about hurricanes: the element of guilt.  

One does not wish that an earthquake shake somewhere else; that is not in the nature of earthquakes. If you’re on or near a fault, you will be shaken. A flood belongs to a particular river or river system. You cannot say to yourself, “I hope the flood hits another river instead of mine.” All you can do is fill sandbags or flee to higher ground. You can wish away a tornado without wishing it on someone else. You can just hope that it jumps your house or swallows itself back into the clouds, leaving everything and everybody intact.  

But with a hurricane, the wish that your town be spared automatically means that you are hoping someone else’s town is hit. The pain of watching a Katrina or a Rita or a Gustav veer away from Galveston means that someone in Brownsville, or along the Mexican coast, or in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, or Florida will be swept by wind, rain, and the deadly tidal surge that you have just avoided.    

The top photo is of the Gulf of Mexico in Galveston. It was taken the day that Gustav hit the central and eastern Gulf coast. The photo below is of a Seawall monument to the 6,000 or more who perished in Galveston’s 1900 storm, a storm that most certainly would have been wished away if anyone had seen it coming.

Every year, Galveston has a Backyard Garden tour of selected well-maintained yards about town. I try not to miss the occasion, both because it is a good way to be introduced to plants that may not die in our humid summer air, but also because there are some excellent examples of garden art.  It is not difficult to have artistic touches in your yard. Gazing balls abound and bird baths and fountains turn what would have been a grassy corner into an oasis. But really good garden art is not just art “in” the garden; it is art that has become part of the garden.

Much of the knack of developing good garden art is placement. I’m attaching two examples here from this year’s tour. The brick wall makes the cat bird house come alive. The ceramic frog doesn’t even have to be seen as a frog because it is so much a part of the shady kaleidoscopic cranny dominated by the caladium.

There are buildings going up all over the island, especially on the west and east ends. The majority of the new construction is luxury homes and condominiums, most of them designed as second or retirement homes for those who have an extra million or two to put towards a residence on a storm-prone barrier island. At the far eastern end, however, there is a section of land now designated for the development of the East End Lagoon Park and Nature Preserve. Long a favorite spot for fishermen and birders, the constantly shifting lagoon looks out over the Bolivar Pass leading into the Houston Ship Channel. There a solitary pelican hovers on an updraft as two tankers sit just outside the Pass, waiting to be piloted into the heavy traffic lanes of the Channel.

Every year the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston, along with other sites throughout the island, is hit with a blizzard of black birds, mostly Great-tailed Grackles mixed with European Starlings. During the day the birds are not very noticeable, just part of the local avian life. But at dawn and at dusk, they congregate to roost in trees and on ledges, filling the dim sky with the din of their cry and the muted flutter of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of wings. I need not go into detail about the side effect of these roosts upon the sidewalks and lawns under the trees.

These nocturnal deposits have led many residents to attempt multiple strategies to convince the roosting birds to find a new set of trees for their bedroom. We have had plastic owls with mechanically rotating heads, tapes of hawks and other raptors, booms and bangs of recorded fireworks and shotguns, but none of them seem to have a long term impact. The grackles, after all, were roosting here long before we arrived, and behave as though they have the right to continue regardless of what we may think of them. The starlings have joined the grackles over the last century but seem to be equally assured of their property rights. I like to point out to those who complain about the grackle/starling invasion that the primary food of both species when they are here is insects, especially yummy larvae. If we have, say, 200,000 birds in the combined flocks (which is easily imaginable) and they stay for 30 days and eat, on a guess, five insects each every day, then the island has been spared 30,000,000 bugs that would still be around if the flock were to leave. And if that’s not a blessing, I’m not sure what is.

The new year is upon us and so far the winter weather in Galveston has been erratic but not too bad. According to our local weather guru, we are overdue for a hard freeze. The last time the thermometer hit freezing, and just barely at 32 degrees, was during the great snowfall of Christmas Day, 2004. We had almost four inches of the white stuff and it obliged us by sticking around for three or four hours so we could enjoy it. The photograph here was taken that day and shows our resident mockingbird waiting for his/her daily dose of raisins. I could swear he/she is frowning about the weather, but it’s not clear from this distance.  

That was the second snow of our 20 years here. Snow on palm trees looks a little anachronistic, but interesting. Kids (and their parents) were out in the wee morning hours, building snowmen and making snow angels before the sun would come up and start the thaw. The heaviest snowfall here, six inches, was on January 12, 1886, and it was notable enough to make the New York Times. According to the Times article, by “10 o’clock” the weather moderated enough that “thousands of clerks and others in the business part of the town turned out and enjoyed the novelty of snowballing.” I don’t doubt that the weather was a novelty, but the “thousands of clerks” does somewhat bewilder me. This was a thriving commercial and economic center in 1886, but I doubt that there were that many clerks in a town of just over 22,000. This was probably just a little NY “Yankee” hyperbole.  

Sometimes you just happen to be in the right spot at the right time. Last weekend, I was driving around out on the west end of the island, when I spotted a very fit-looking Angus cow eyeing the fresh grass on the road side of the barbed wire fence that contained her. A little Cattle Egret was watching her as she carefully poked her head between the barbed strands. I pulled my car over to the side, opened the window on the passenger side, pulled out my trusty point-and-shoot digital camera and quickly took a shot before the bird was spooked off. In the second or so between pushing the shutter button and the time the camera finishes its record, the cow swung her head around to return the egret’s gaze. There was only time for the one shot, no time to adjust for the contrast between the white egret and the blackness of the cow, no time to think about anything except speed. The result is not an excellent photograph, but I find it a very amusing one. And given the rapidity with which condominiums are taking over what little ranch land there is on the island, it may shortly become a record of the local extinction of both the cow and her winged friend.

About four or five years ago, I suddenly began seeing a new spider appearing around our yard. The spider itself was small, less than a half inch long, but the webs were large, geometrically precise, and marvelous. Marvelous, that is, unless you happen to walk through one or catch a long anchor line in your hair as you wandered around, minding your own business. The webs, perfect examples of an orb weaver’s artistry, are beautiful, decorated with little tufts of cotton-like balls at intervals. But the spiders themselves are also gorgeous, like little white, red, orange, or yellow jewels, speckled with black dots, adorned with little spikes that have give them the common name of “crab spider.”  

They are not, however, true crab spiders, those little yellow and white denizens of my rose bushes and wildflowers. These are Spinybacked Orbweavers, Gasteracantha cancriformis, a species that seems to have suddenly appeared all over the island within the last decade, mostly in the last three or four years. Other common names, according to bugguide.net, include: Crab Spider, Spiny Orbweaver Spider, Crab-like Orbweaver Spider, Crab-like Spiny Orbweaver Spider, Jewel Spider, Spiny-bellied Orbweaver, Jewel Box Spider, Smiley Face Spider, and Crablike Spiny Orbweaver. Quite a list for a half-inch spider.  

The Spinybacked Orbweaver is not just any spider, however. In 1999, she (most of the ones you see are female) even had her very own 33 cent U.S. postage stamp as part of an insect and spider stamp series, sharing the limelight with my other favorite arachnid, the Jumping Spider, and one of my least favorites (although, admittedly, rather well-dressed in her patent leather coat), the Black Widow.

The temperature is still hovering in the 90s and it’s October and that’s too hot for October. Nature, however, seems to be ignoring the heat and proceeding with its settled schedule of activity. We still have hummingbirds in the yard, but I’m willing to bet that they will be gone within the next two weeks, just as they have disappeared in mid-October for the ten years I’ve been collecting yard data on their comings and goings. A new batch of White-winged Doves have appeared from somewhere to the north. I can tell they are new because they are not familiar with my feeding schedule. Unlike their summer cousins, they aren’t perching in our oak tree every morning at 7:00 waiting for me to come out and fill the feeder. They find the food, but mostly because they just happen to be in the territory and come down to check it out.  

Two years ago, my son sent me a couple of American beautyberry bushes from a wildflower farm in Missouri. I set them out in the back yard, one in the oak’s shade and the other with some afternoon sun. Last year they set a few berries, but this year they are both performing on cue. The literature says that mockingbirds love the berries, but so far nothing seems to have touched them, including the mocker that stations itself on the neighbor’s chimney and serenades us every morning.