By Bill Ward
Published in The Boerne Star on May 25, 2007
There is a tropical-looking shrub with long spikes of scarlet-red blooms that is becoming more and more popular in Hill Country gardens these days. It is the eye-catching coralbean (Erythrina herbacea). Don’t look for this plant growing in fields around Boerne, because it is a native of East Texas and the southeastern Gulf Coastal Plain.
Even though the soils are clayey or sandy where it grows wild, coralbean does very well in the calcareous ground of Hill Country gardens. It can grow in part shade and full sun, and it is drought tolerant. Coralbean is the Operation NICE! (Natives Instead of Common Exotics!) Plant of the Month for June.
One winter almost 50 years ago when I was trudging through the Piney Woods of East Texas making a geologic map, I noticed some bright-red bean-like seeds in tough brown seed pods hanging on the slender, leafless limbs of a small bush. Having spent all my life until that year in Central Texas, I naturally was reminded of mountain laurel beans. But there was a difference.
When these East Texas seed pods opened, the seeds clung tightly to the margins of the pods. It looked as if the pods had parted to display the seed, but not to let them go. I took home some branches with open seed pods showing their red beans, because my wife was experimenting with dried-flower arranging in those days. She used them in some arrangements, and the seed pods with their beans intact lasted for years. I don’t know if the red beans ever did fall off.
The next spring, I saw that the leaves of this “red-bean” plant were composed of three leaflets that sort of reminded me of certain beans, but I was surprised by how the flowers looked. This low shrub sent up long bloom spikes with pretty clusters of red tubular-shaped flowers. Finally I could identify this plant in a book as coralbean.
I thought coralbean might look good in our yard; so I tried transplanting it from the woods (yes, I was being NICE! 45 years before there was such a thing). I’m happy to say it did very well as a landscape plant and began to spread a little. Later I gave a piece of this coralbean to a friend in Austin, where it bloomed happily, even though it was in clayey calcareous soil entirely different from its sandy acid-soil origins. Probably coralbean is so resilient under different temperature, moister and soil conditions because it has a huge tuber-like root that undoubtedly sustains this plant through droughts and cold spells.
In recent years, I’ve seen the huge clumps of coralbean more than six feet tall that are common along the coast near Rockport as well as another species of coralbean that grows into a low tree 10-20 feet high in the limestone mountains of northeastern Mexico. Most of the Texas native coralbeans I’ve noticed in Hill Country gardens get no taller than three or four feet and die back completely in the winter. However, some bushes growing in protected places in the Boerne area have gotten many feet wide and eight feet tall.
Local nurseries commonly have coralbean in stock this time of year. The Boerne Chapter of the Native Plant Society of Texas provides free planting and care instructions for coralbean at nurseries participating in Operation NICE! (Barkley’s Nursery Center, Hill Country African Violets and Nursery, and Maldonado Landscape and Nursery).
WHAT’S BLOOMING IN THE BACK YARD NOW?
Red-pink: coralbean, cone-flower, standing cypress, Indian blanket, red yucca, skullcap, cedar sage, Salvia greggii, Salvia darcyi, evening primrose, Indian pink (East Texas).
Orange: lantana, Indian blanket, Mexican hat, pincushion daisy.
Yellow: golden-ball lead tree, bush sunflower, huisache daisy, cowpen daisy, two-leaf senna, coreopsis, prickly pear, zexmenia, slender-stem bitterweed, Engelmann daisy, green-eyes, smoketree, parralena
Purple: prairie brazoria, Mexican oregano, prairie verbena, winecup, horsemint, cholla, desert willow.
Blue: mealy sage, Lindheimer morning glory, pickerelweed, Engelmann salvia, prairie larkspur, indigo spires.
White: prickly poppy, blackfoot daisy, thoroughwort, waterlily, Texas bindweed, lizard’s tail.
