A canyon endemic blooms at Circle C in a rainless August
August 27, 2026
A (Clematis texensis) turned up at Circle C Ranch in early August, its nodding, urn-shaped red blooms unmistakable where the vine climbed through the surrounding brush. This is not a plant most people will ever see outside a fairly narrow strip of Texas. Unlike most clematis species, which produce flat, open, star-shaped flowers built for a wide range of pollinator visitors, this one has evolved a thick, leathery, almost fully closed bell. That shape is thought to be a specialization for hummingbird pollination: a tubular, nectar-guarded flower that a hovering bird can probe but a crawling insect mostly cannot. It is a design detail that only makes sense once you know the range it comes from.That range is essentially the Balcones escarpment and nothing more. Clematis texensis is endemic to the limestone canyons of the Edwards Plateau and shows up in USGS vegetation classification as one of the diagnostic species of the Balconian dry-mesic hardwood forest, the canyon-slope plant community that gives this whole landscape its name. Finding it here is not just a rare-plant sighting; it is a small confirmation that this patch of ground still supports the actual community type the region is built around, rather than a degraded stand-in for it. It bloomed alongside a broader late-summer wave of Edwards Plateau natives, among them , , and , all flowering in the same window.The vine's tight range is itself a consequence of water. It grows specifically on limestone canyon slopes and streamside margins, the exact terrain the Balcones system is carved from, and the surface water in that terrain is running low right now. Nearby Bear Creek is reading zero flow at both of its gauges, with gage height near the bottom of its 30-day range; Maha Creek at Von Quintus Road is also reading 0 ft³/s. Dripping Springs, the closest weather station, has logged no measurable rain this month against a normal of over an inch, with highs running nearly three degrees above average, and Travis County has held at moderate-to-severe drought for three straight weeks after peaking higher in June. None of that speaks to the condition of this particular vine — it is simply the weather and streamflow picture the August bloom happened in.Separately, and from a different part of the same investigation: the CRU-WRRF2 wastewater treatment plant is currently listed in significant non-compliance on its EPA record, and it discharges into this drainage system. That listing is a status on a regulatory record and nothing more. It does not identify a pollutant, a temperature exceedance, or any specific discharge event, and significant non-compliance is frequently assigned for administrative failures such as a missed or late report. It is also worth being explicit about what we cannot say: the USGS stations in this watershed report only gage height and discharge — there is no dissolved oxygen, temperature, pH, or turbidity monitoring downstream of the facility — so there is no water quality data available to us that would show any effect on the creek or on the plant community above it. We are noting the compliance status because it is on the record, not because anything here connects it to conditions on the ground.
