Sisterwild? This is an old name we made up years ago when imagining ourselves with a bit of land near Sisterfarm. Emphasis on the “wild,” as a counterbalance to the orderly and organized way our girlfriends arranged their lives and land at Sisterfarm. It was, we said, the name for a mythical home we hoped one day to enjoy in the Hill Country. After a while, we abandoned the name, thinking it too evocative of a different lifestyle, one we would not want to be identified with.
But here we are, many years later, enjoying as our own that precious piece of Texas Hill Country once known and celebrated as Sisterfarm. And so our playful tease comes back to us but with a slightly different meaning this time. It is a kind of homage to Carol and Elise, our sisters who created a place, a space, where women of many different persuasions and practices could meet and share a kind of sisterhood. A kinship with one another and with the earth.
So we will lay claim to “Sister” as a way to express our gratitude to our girlfriends for all they brought to us and created for us and shared with us in their life here at Sisterfarm.
But we have adopted this place and let it grow wild with “weeds”–native grasses and forbs and brush of all kinds. No orderly planting of winter, spring, summer, fall crops here. No planning ahead and ordering of seeds, no drawing out the garden plots, no figuring what will live and thrive next to what. No, it’s all just wild for now. What grows stays. What dies and dries goes to the compost bins or simply composts in situ. You get the picture, right?
So you might think of it as Sisterfarm-gone-wild…Sister-
Sideoats grama in flower, summer 2012
And you might be wondering about “Bouteloua Times” and how that fits in. Or what the heck “bouteloua” is! Bouteloua is a genus of native grasses. In fact, the state grass is Bouteloua curtipendula or, as it is more commonly known, sideoats grama. And we are really excited about discovering all the native grasses that are growing so wildly all over this land. Sideoats grama, hairy grama, switchgrass, little bluestem, Eastern gamagrass, cupgrass, silky bluestem, Lindheimer rosette grass, Lindheimer muhly, seep muhly, purple three-awn and Texas three-awn, and a zillion others we’ve yet to identify. (And don’t for a moment think that just because I can write all those names of grasses that I can actually identify all of them! That is a work in progress.)
Bouteloua Times is our way to report on the wildness growing here–grasses, yes, and also wildflowers, spiders, birds, insects, trees, critters big and small–natives or transplants to this land, making life here so extraordinarily interesting and exquisitely beautiful and endlessly surprising. I mean, c’mon!–a porcupine at the back gate?!
That’s the life and “bouteloua times” at Sisterwild.