The Eastwoods Neighborhood Association and Austin’s Parks and Recreation Department will dedicate a new interpretive panel at Eastwoods Park this Saturday, February 11. This panel tells the story of the beginning of Juneteenth celebrations in Austin in Wheeler’s Grove, an early name for the park. Fermata wrote and designed the panel, and I plan on attending the dedication. Congratulations to all involved for seeing this through to the finish.
I am continuing my work on the Wildflower Wall project. There will be a number of associated interpretive panels that illustrate the storyline, and each will be accompanied by a narrative panel that interprets the storyline in narrative. This is one of two pollinator panels, this one limited to butterflies.
The second panel will have a diversity of other insect pollinators.
The third panel in this triptych will be the narrative panel that explains the relationship between our wildflowers and their pollinators.
For those of you not familiar with all of the flowers (all photographed in the Texas Hill Country in Travis County); from left to right, top to bottom:
Firewheel (Gaillardia pulchella)
Plateau goldeneye (Viguiera dentata)
Eryngo (Eryngium leavenworthii)
Texas kidneywood (Eysenhardtia texana)
Butterflies (left to right, top to bottom)
Common buckeye (Junonia coenia)
Tailed orange (Eurema proterpia)
Juniper hairstreak (Callophrys gryneus)
Ceraunus blue (Hemiargus ceraunus)
For the past five years, especially during the Covid sabbatical, I have been spending virtually every day during the season in the field trying to complete my gallery of Texas Hill Country wildflowers. There are now 3000 portraits in the gallery. There are a few gaps, but for the most part I am finished and ready to move on to the next project.
One use of the portraits is the development of a wildflower wall showing how these flowers use every color in the visible spectrum (not to mention ultraviolet) to attract pollinators. The wall is currently designed is an octoptych (an eight-panel polyptych) that is 4′ by 24′. I will add interpretive panels at each end, so the final wall will be 4′ by 30′.
The individual portraits themselves are formatted in the gallery as 2′ by 2′, so conceivably the wall could be 8′ by 48′ without the interpretive panels at the ends.
There is many more individual elements in this collection, but the wildflower wall may be the most dramatic.
For additional information about the exhibit and all of its component parts, contact me directly at Fermata Inc.
Ted Lee Eubanks
My shoveling through the Fermata archives is getting even more revealing. I came across a copy of AVITOURISM IN TEXAS – Two Studies of Birders in Texas and their Potential Support for the Proposed World Birding Center. Authored by Dr. Jon Stoll (University of Wisconsin at Green Bay) and I, this research, among other studies by us and others, set the stage for the development of the World Birding Centers.
What it also revealed? I am getting old! The date of this document is October 12, 1999!
And, as long as I am feeling ancient, I am reminded that we began the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail, the first to be developed in the world, in 1993. Someone remind my dear friend and partner Madge Lindsay the next time you see her!
I wrote Our Austin Story, an interpretive plan for downtown Austin, a few years ago. Over the past two years the Austin History Center Association (AHCA) has produced an annual play based on Our Austin Story. These plays are written by Paullette MacDougal based on a selection of stories from the interpretive plan.Here is a recording of the play from last year, the last time we could all meet in person. And, yes, I am in the play. I will post a link to the 2021 play once it becomes available. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B0X_K8GUFE&feature=emb_logo