Surprise, Surprise, Surprise!

Hubby was outside grilling our dinner this weekend, when he suddenly stuck his head in the door and hollered "Becky! Come here!" I thought perhaps the grill had caught on fire again. Fortunately, it had not. Instead, he pointed up the hill behind our house and asked "What the heck is that, and where did it come from?"

There before me was an itsy bitsy tree covered in pink blossoms -- one which I had never seen before, and did not plant myself.

At first I thought it must be a little fruit tree of some sort, which came to us via some bird droppings. However, once we had climbed the hill to get a closer look, we discovered that those were not the sort of blooms you see on a fruit tree. They were fuzzy pink pom-poms!

Pom-poms which I have seen before, on other scrawny little shrubs with mesquite-like leaves, which are scattered about our property. This one may have been here all along and we just never noticed it before since it was so far away, and they have never bloomed quite so prolifically as they did this year.

After consulting my native plant bible -- Jill Nokes' How to Grow Native Plants of Texas and the Southwest -- I decided it must be Calliandra eriophylla, commonly known as Fairy Duster, False Mesquite, or Charrasquillo.

Fairy Duster. How appropriate!