My husband and I went hiking about a week ago on a nature preserve about 15 minutes from our home.
It's a little gem of the Blackland Prairie preserved in McKinney, Tx.
McKinney is a suburb north of Dallas, TX.
It has a wonderful native plant garden in front that attracts bees and butterflies when the flowers are in bloom. We weren't disappointed and saw some of each and a hummingbird.
After walking through the garden we went out on the nature preserve property and hiked on 3 of their trails - each less than a mile long.
I've included pictures of the native plant garden and some trees on the nature preserve trails.
Bessie Heard donated this land to be a nature preserve.
I'm sure glad she did as there are now homes surrounding the Heard Museum property.
Only 20 years ago when I started taking my son and daughter to the pre-school nature program classes, there was still open land adjacent to it.
Because of the soil and climate, the Blackland Prairie was ideally suited to crop agriculture. Unfortunately, that led to most of the Blackland Prairie ecosystem being converted to crop production and left less than one percent of the original intact.
I hope you enjoy Part 1 today of the Heard Museum Native Plant Garden and Nature Preserve.
Tomorrow I will post the photos of the trees out along the hiking trails!
The first 2 photos look like a wild petunia. I couldn't find a sign that identified them.
These next 2 are photos of Mistflower. Butterflies and bees really love these flowers!
Flower with a bumblebee!
Next is the red yucca.
You can see its seed pods and flowers!
Inland sea oats are next.
I'm not sure what these flowers are either, but this part of the native garden is the area with all of these lovely rounded rocks to collect rain runoff. Once again the bumblebees loved these flowers!
Have a wonderful day! Hope you can get outside and enjoy nature!
All photos taken by me 
Here is Part 2 about The Heard.