Bald Cypress

I found this lovely "little" specimen right by a pond, but some the nearby trees of the same kind were actually half in the water.
The Bald Cypresses are one of the few deciduous conifers in the USA and this grows in a path from Texas, through Florida, up to Virginia. They lose their leaves in the Winter and grow them back very quickly.
The Montezuma Cypress is very similar to the Bald Cypress but does not produce "knees" much (occasionally but not often or many). The "knees" tell all. This particular tree doesn't have many knees, but the one next to it did. Cypress Knees are when the roots grow up out of the ground and go straight back down, this can either look like wooden spikes or just a bunch of rounded knobs surrounding the trunk. The leaves are reminiscent of pine, but lay flat in opposite pairs along a thin branchlet. The branchlets shoot off down the stem in a spiraling fashion. The leaves are flat, light green, pointed, and 1/2 - 3/4 of an inch long. The branchlets are 2-4 inches long. That's another difference with the Montezuma, it's branchlets get up to 6 inches long.
This might give you a slightly better idea of size of the leaves. Those right there in the middle are cones. Yep, they're round. Yep, they look like battered green golf balls. They are about an inch in diameter and may have a slightly waxy look to them. It's important to remember that these cones turn grey-green, not brown like most other conifer tree's cones.
There are both male and female flowers the male flowers are up to 4 inches long (female flowers are shorter); they are green hanging cords with a whole bunch of little buds off the sides.
The bark as you can see is reddish-greyish and quite flaky looking. The trunk is rough with deep ridges, but the branches are more like scaly paper.
It's a beautiful tree and gives great shade, but not so great for climbing. Maybe I'll find some good climbing trees eventually, but all the ones with supportive branches would need a ladder to get to.

Gay-Feather

I love using books to identify plants and animals.
I found this beautiful road-side flower - it's purple, which is one of my favorite flower colors (I also like orange, but not together in bouquets), with fine messy petals. It took less than five minutes to scan a 250 page wildflower book and verify online. Granted, sometimes the books don't help, but most of the time they do and most of the time it's quick. I do have to say one thing in favor of online plant identification: you'll find more information than you need, you may even learn to identify a species you haven't even encountered yet. Now that that is out of the way... onto the plant.

Blazing Stars, or Gay-Feathers as they are also known, grow pretty much everywhere in the US that lies to the East of the Rockies. There are different variants and species, but most of them look similar enough that it's easy enough to figure out once you've seen one. Sometimes the flowers look more separate poofs, sometimes you can see the petals, and sometimes you can't.
This particular one you can barely see the petals for the (don't know what they actually are) purple tentacles coming out of the flowers. They grow in a 1-4 foot spike and the flowers bloom from the top down. The flowers are 1/2 - 3/4 of an inch and the thin leaves poking out the sides are up to 3 inches long.
They usually bloom late Spring through Late Summer, but since this is Texas heat and a Texan plant and apparently they can bloom here until early December.

Pecan Tree

The funniest thing about this type of tree was that I first picked a pecan out of what I thought was a Persimmon. The pecan branch was sticking in with the Persimmon so what when I reached in to get a fruit, I got a nut* instead.
I couldn't even see the pecan tree the persimmon was so thick, so I was just sitting there trying to figure out what purpose it served to the persimmon. I could say I'm smart enough to not tell people about my silly ideas, but I thought that picture of utter confusing might prove amusing.

The Pecan is the state tree of Texas. Now what better reason could there be to know how to identify it?

This is the first tree I've tried to identify that has compound leaves. The leaves themselves are alternate, growing 12-20 inches long and having between 9-17 leaflets. The leaflets are between 2-5 inches long and 1-2.5 inches wide. The pecan always has one leaflet on the end of the rachis** and the rest grow in pairs, so it will always have an odd number of leaflets. The leaflets are lightly toothed (almost like the edge of a ripped newspaper), and shaped like a spear head with the tips being slightly curved.

Pecans are large trees, generally between 60-130 feet tall, and this one was doing it's best towering over most of the other trees in the area.

In the Spring they get "catkins" which are the flowers and look like green dreadlocks - they are up to 7 inches long. Later they get the nuts which have a thick protective case around them. They are egg shaped with four ridges running vertically, they start out green but turn brown. When the nut is ripe for eating the case with peel back into quarters and you can pluck the pecan out.

The bark is crinkly, wrinkly, and ridged but not very deeply. It's a grey-brown, but other than that I really don't know how to describe it.

*Factoid! Pecans are part of the Hickory family are do not have true nuts. They are actually similar to peaches and plums, aka: drupes.
**I had to look that one up, it's the main stem of the compound leaf. All the leaflets branch off this main stem.

Whatsit called... Twinkle

I stood out during the nighttime for the first time. I'd been outside all right, but not for long - never long enough for my eyes to adjust enough to really see the stars.
I found Jupiter easily, but had to pull out a compass to find the Little Dipper as half of its stars weren't visible and I only had a vague idea which way North was (that drives me nuts, not knowing North).
The weirdest thing was the twinkling. There is some real twinkle, twinkle little star going on here. I know that the earth's atmosphere causes the winking out which we call "twinkling" but I never quite noticed it like this in the North.
Quite honestly I had a disconcerting moment once my eyes adjusted because my first thought was, "Those can't all be satellites." The whole sky kept blinking and winking and twinkling at me; once I got used to it I thought it was cool, but things that are that different are definitely weird at first.

Extra Special Find

If you live in Texas and the Southwest and love to try new things and finding uses for wild plants... this book is just for you.
I found it in the library and it's awesome! There's in depth ways to find the right wild plants and fruits, it even has recipes in it. I really want to try making sauted tumbleweed roots with bacon or persimmon jam.
Maybe it's just me, but I think anyone interested in the outdoors would like this book.

Edible and Useful Plants of Texas and the Southwest by Delena Tull. First printed in 1987, this printing in 1999

A note: It also has a section on identifying poisonous plants and fruits as well.

Crow-Poison

True to it's name Crow-Poison, or False Garlic, is poisonous if ingested. Every bit of it is poisonous, you can not eat any part of the plant... leaves, roots, flowers, stems, nothing. This makes me glad this wilted and died before I could get it home because many of my unattended samples have been partially eaten. As an aside, samples I know have poisonous elements, like a cutting from a bush with white berries (I don't know what it is, but I can't think of any non-poisonous white berry), goes into a closed box.
This is a Southern plant; the farthest North it goes is Southern Illinois, but it's all over the Dixieland.
I learned a new word while looking up this lovely little plant: tepal. "Tepal" is actually the general term for all outer parts of the flower, but is usually used when the petals and sepals are indistinguishable. Crow-Poison is one such plant and the Rainlilies I covered recently also have tepals (Tulips as well).

Crow-Poison has six white tepals with a thin purple or brown stripe on the backs of each one. It has six stamen surrounding one pistil, all of them have yellow-green bottoms, white middles, and yellow tops. The 1 inch diameter flowers grow in bunches off the top of one 6-16 inch stem. The leaves are on the very bottom and grow almost as long as the stems and are only about 1/8 of an inch diameter (they're round as well). These flowers frequently grow in large patches covering yards and fields, but can be found alone. If you're looking to find these they actually flower both in the Spring and in the Fall, so you don't actually have to wait all year for them to turn up again.
They grow from bulbs, like onions or tulips. Actually they look a lot like wild onions except the flowers are bigger and there aren't as many on each stem (generally no more than 8 flowers on one stem). Since onions are okay to eat and these are not you need to remember Crow-Poison does not have any hint of a garlicy-oniony smell, they don't have much of any smell.

Despite it being a weed and poisonous, it's a pretty flower and a really awesome name.

Common Paper Wasp

This brown and yellow wasp is the Common Paper Wasp. It's the exclamans one as the Austrailians call their humilis "Common" as well.
Full grown these are between 3/4 and 1 inch long are are thin wasps (being no more than 1/4 inch wide/thick). They have red-brown spots on every joint of the abdomen and a red-brown, elongated, pentagon on their thorax pointing towards their head. That pentagon (which is the same shape as Superman's super-logo) is an easy give-away, not to mention it's brown instead of black like most yellow and [blank] wasps.
Their wings are long and brown, and their antenna are black with red tips. Their legs are multicolored as well. They have large, brown, compound eyes and triangular heads.

Being paper wasps they have the paper celled nest. The nests point downward and are made up of hexagonal cells that are sometimes covered, and sometimes not. You can usually find these under eves, by doors, pretty much any relatively protected area though you'll probably find them most frequently on buildings.
They are fairly non-aggressive wasps, so if the nest is out of the reach of children you don't have remove it. I read reports of people being inches away from the nest and the wasps still not caring. The Common Paper Wasps are great for gardens, they feed on all those nasty bugs that eat the gardens and give them to their larvae as well. So unless they are posing a danger by being too near a door or if there are overly curious children, it's best to leave them be.