White where yellow belongs
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How strange it was for me to find this white
In places yellow’s thought to hold by right.
When I photographed along FM 20 east of Lockhart on April 30th, I found dense colonies of Gaillardia pulchella, known as firewheels and Indian blankets, which have had an abundant season in central Texas. Among the hundreds of flower heads that lined one stretch of the road, I found a few that were different from any I’d seen before: the tips of their rays were white rather than the normal yellow that you can see peeking through from a conventional flower head below this unusual one (and that you’ve seen more clearly in plenty of other firewheel photographs on this blog).
I wondered about this unusual white-fringed firewheel, so I asked someone from the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, who sent my question farther afield. In short order we had a reply from botanist Thomas J. Watson: “G. pulchella is a highly variable taxon, especially in floret colors, and I have seen a broad variety of ligule coloration in the taxon. I have never seen the white tipped ligules before but I am not at all surprised. I doubt that it is more than an individual variant in a larger population of more typical color forms…. Turner and others have had students studying the genetics and morphological variation in pulchella over the years with very little learned about its sources. So the white variant is unusual, likely due to a mutation in the genome of a single individual and of relatively little importance to the taxonomy of the species. It would have to be correlated with other character differences and would have to have population integrity before such a variant might be considered for taxonomic recognition.”
So there you have it: a firewheel that’s probably of no botanical significance, but a rare and curious one you’re free to take delight in.
© 2013 Steven Schwartzman
Red on green: Autumn sage flowers in nimblewill grass
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Here’s a flowering autumn sage, Salvia greggii, in a stand of nimblewill grass, Muhlenbergia schreberi, at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center on April 25. Today marks the first appearance in this blog for both of those species.
© 2013 Steven Schwartzman
Green on green
This green-on-green photograph shows the fiddlehead formed by the new leaf of a western shield fern, Thelypteris kunthii, that I found at the damp base of a little cliff in Great Hills Park on May 6.
To see the places in the southeastern United States where this lovely fern grows, you can check out the state-clickable map at the USDA.
© 2013 Steven Schwartzman
Predilections
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The ray flowers of the Engelmann daisy, Engelmannia peristenia, have a predilection to curl under in the heat of the day. Certain insects have a predilection to eat those rays, curled or not, as you can see from some of the chomping that has taken place here, especially at the top. And speaking of insects, Val Bugh informs me that the tiny striped insect in this photograph, which I’ve been noticing a fair number of around Austin this spring, is a predatory thrips* in the family Aelothripidae and the genus Aeolothrips. With all the rays of sunshine pouring down on the bright yellow rays of the Engelmann daisy, you might say that this little creature got to thrip the light fantastic.
Date: May 1. Place: west side of Interstate 35 near Wells Branch Parkway in far north Austin.
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* Like species and series, thrips is a noun whose singular and plural are the same.
© 2013 Steven Schwartzman
More profusion…
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… of wildflowers, that is, alongside FM 20 a few miles east of Lockhart on April 30.
Bright yellow: Engelmann daisies, Engelmannia peristenia.
Purplish blue: bluebonnets, Lupinus texensis.
Yellow-fringed red: firewheels or Indian blankets, Gaillardia pulchella.
Other red in lower right: Indian paintbrush, Castilleja indivisa.
© 2013 Steven Schwartzman
Prickly pear and stonecrop
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Behold a prickly pear cactus, Opuntia engelmannii, in various stages simultaneously. A new pad, with its hook-like little leaves that soon vanish, is growing on the edge of a paler green and somewhat mottled pad, and behind them a dead and dry pad has lost almost all its green but has taken on textures and patterns that are visually appealing. I found this three-stage cactus surrounded by a dense colony of yellow stonecrop, Sedum nuttallianum, a low succulent whose tiny flowers you can make out, especially to the left of the cactus. Today marks stonecrop’s first appearance in these pages. Like the last two pictures, this one comes from McKinney Falls State Park on May 6.
To see the places in the south-central United States where yellow stonecrop grows, you can check the state-clickable map at the USDA.
© 2013 Steven Schwartzman
A floral, arboreal, campestral, and celestial view
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On the May 6th visit to McKinney Falls State Park in southeast Austin that produced yesterday’s photograph of a fasciated verbena, I found that the fields bordering the main park road were unusually flowerful. Here you see a colony of Engelmann daisies, Engelmannia peristenia, in front of one dead tree, several live ones, and some happily wispy clouds.
© 2013 Steven Schwartzman
