By Bill Ward
Published in The Boerne Star on April 30, 2004
Operation NICE! (Natives Instead of the Common Exotics!) recommendation for May is the long-blooming yellow bells or esperanza (Tecoma stans). This native-Texas shrub is readily available in local nurseries and does well in Hill Country gardens. As the common name “esperanza” seems to suggest, this plant is our great hope for showy flowers during the heat of late summer.
Yellow bells is a multibranched shrub which can grow several feet high in this area. Its abundant green foliage makes it an attractive landscape plant, even between bloomings. Leaves are several inches long and lanced-shaped with serrated margins.
Intermittently, from April to the first hard freeze, yellow bells has profuse clusters of large bright-yellow trumpet-shaped flowers. The ones in our yard seem to have some of their branches in bloom almost continuously from mid-summer to late fall. Yellow is the usual color of Tecoma stans flowers, as the common names “yellow bells” and “yellow trumpet” indicate. An orange-colored variety also has been propagated for the nursery trade.
The first time I was aware of yellow bells in the wild was on the wall of a dry limestone canyon in northern Mexico south of Big Bend National Park. Despite months of severe drought in that area, the woody branches had clusters of yellow trumpets.
Judging from the natural habitat of yellow bells, this plant would prefer garden sites with full sun and good drainage. Undoubtedly, it is highly drought-tolerant. Jill Nokes (“How to Grow Native Plants of Texas and the Southwest”) suggests that allowing yellow bells to dry out between deep waterings will encourage blooming.
The Boerne Chapter of the Native Plant Society of Texas provides free planting and care instructions for yellow bells (esperanza) at the nurseries participating in Operation NICE!: Hill Country African Violets and Nursery, Maldonado Landscape and Nursery, and Barkley’s Nursery Center.
Yellow bells is in the same family as desert willow, trumpet vine, and catalpa. Tecoma stans is not found in Marshall Enquist’s “Wildflowers of the Texas Hill Country” because its natural range does not include the Edwards Plateau. However, it is recorded nearby in Bexar and Hays Counties (“Atlas of the Vascular Plants of Texas”). In Texas it is found mostly in the TransPecos region and deep South Texas.
The drought-tolerant and cold-hardy West Texas variety (T. stans var. angustata) is the one that is best for landscaping in the Hill Country. A more-tropical variety (T. stans var. stans) might not survive our winters.
The bushes of yellow bells in our backyard die back completely every winter, but they always send up new foliage in the spring. They seem to grow slowly at first, but begin to add foliage rapidly as the temperature gets hotter. Ours reach their flowering peak in late summer and early fall. We always look forward to their bright-yellow blooms.
