Utility Research Garden

10/03/2026

This is great. It’s nice to have these creatures in our lives

The 18 winning images chosen from about 1,900 entries to the annual contest from 50 countries across the globe

09/22/2026

I don’t know about you guys, but I really like seeds. And stars. And snakes. And friends who are from other places. We’re all from other places or we’re all from here because there are no other places. This is it. And this place goes on for a long, long time.
Anyway, I was on a walk up a hill near the South Llano and I said to my friend, “when are we going to see a rattle-snake on this trail?” And a little while later he jumped and I looked around and said “what?, as I looked down at my flip-flopped feet blindly.

But on the bright side the place where I hang my hat still has stars.
Yes, the Gas Stations are coming for them. They hate them obviously with their million watt lighting but for now we still buy gas at a two pump-low lit chump of a gas station where they don’t sell b**r. That’s East Texas for you.
And as to seeds I try and collect some most everywhere I go. This morning it will be Sabal minor. Just up from the snake there were Dasylirion.The day we were in Nacogdoches a couple of weeks ago I found some Maple seeds helicoptering their way to Earth after a brief time floating above it.
PJ, at 24 is in full flowering mode. The girls hover around like bees. Antonio, after 15 years north of the Rio Grande is going to take the thousand dollars Flump has offered and make his way back to banana-land so he can raise some chickens and sit around with the ladies in his life. Alissa under the weeping Cypress is doing her well-researched thing of making gardens full of native plants in the most unlikely places.
We’re all about letting seeds fall back to Earth and then watching them grow even though this sad World keeps us wondering how we keep it up at this pace?

09/16/2026

Hey Grizzly Bears w/o many hairs

I don’t know about you all
but my favorite time of the day are the evenings.

I spent all my summers as a kid on my grandparents farm outside of Houston. My granddad was a rancher and farmed corn and peanuts in Waller County. My grandmother was from Anderson in Grimes County. The towns were close by today’s standards (an hours drive), but World’s apart back then. One on the flat coastal plain and the others on rolling hills left the last time the Gulf was covering all the land I’m describing.
My grandparents used to pull out the folding lawn chairs from the garage closet and sit outside in the late afternoons or really they were evenings. When Leslie Knabel (Leslie was a He-Him) would bring bags of veggies from the garden we’d sit and shell peas or shuck corn or sprinkle salt on the watermelon. At that time Hempstead was “the watermelon capital of the World” and the town next door. But my granddad from Waller was born in 1913 and my grandmother, “Dogie” was from a house on the top of the hill in Anderson, TX and born in 1919. Her other name that most people knew her by was Adelle like the English singer. But lots of people on the Western edge of East Texas knew her as A-Dell.

Anyway,these are all evening shots from where I was last evening on the coast near Freeport. Now I’m sitting on that porch pictured below in Dallas which was land the Comanche rode over not that long ago. These days it belongs to the Capitalists mostly.
So today I’ve been on bottomland hardwood forests, up through the Lost Pines and then rode the edge of the Hill Country up here to the Blackland Prairie.
Those Wood Storks, Roseate Spoonbills and Egrets I saw yesterday evening at the Prison Farm just outside Jones Creek before I headed out. I made a U-turn to go back and watch them, and to take a couple of shots out the window. They all survived.
And before I left East Texas yesterday I saw the Hognose snake behind our casa. And then earlier in the afternoon today I sat across the Trinity river from the Park Train in Fort Worth. That’s not a huge man but just a small Engine. And the Mimosa strigolosa in the first photo is a native groundcover plant (all plants are groundcovers!) that we’re growing at the nursery and I stooped to photograph before I left. It’s only 3” tall. Anyway, that’s all.

06/29/2026

Most of us know what a w**d is.

Or at least we think we do.

The latest newsletter takes a closer look at w**ds, problem solvers, and the plants that are often doing exactly what nature intended.

Read "On Weeds, and Other Problem Solvers" here:
https://mailchi.mp/utilityresearchgarden/on-w**ds-and-other-problem-solvers-june-2026

03/23/2026

This is the ground I’d like to stand on.
This IS the ground in fact that I’ve been working on my whole adult life, finding a new way to educate myself and a different paradigm to work within.
No real competition, just collaboration and care.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DV9HO-4ilIF/?igsh=MWhkeGkwcXdxODJudg==

01/25/2026

Jame is great. We need him in Texas and in the World.

01/22/2026

alright, so here’s what I’m trying to say here is - 1st photo Bambu w/ lots of pretties germinating at their feet which we now plant there in all the pots with a biological inoculent - 2nd Photo “Rhizo-sphere” meaning what you see here is the collection of organisms living around the roots, being fed by the roots while they in-turn feed the roots and the plant! - 3rd photo A root in the center with mycorrhizal fungi acting as the actual “roots”, doing what roots were thought to do - 4th photo telling us something about What’s Happening in the World - 5th Photo is what the World looks like when diversity happens because when it happens at one level it happens at many levels, at all levels, and because we’re not so smart creatures we thought that control and punitive measures would get us somewhere. And it did but probably not where we wanted to go. Let’s go somewhere richer, more colorful, more alive ;-))

12/14/2025

What we do on a Saturday between 10 and 1 p.m.
Dig 14 Bambusa textilis ‘Kanapaha’ for a garden in Houston.
25’ tall. $595ea.
Instant New World!

11/21/2025

East Texas, Zone 8 — our little corner of the world where Carex texensis thrives even in shade, Everillo glows chartreuse through humidity, Temple bamboo stands proud through the cold, and Bilburgia nutans barely flinched at last winter’s teens.
Plants that prove resilience can be beautiful too. 🌾💚

11/12/2025

this is where I was yesterday. It mostly doesn’t look like this anymore. We cut it all down
Because
These kinds of places are scary to most of us. Snakes. Spiders.
But no Epstein Files