Close view of Texas thistle flowers

Flowers in the head of a Texas thistle; click to enlarge.

And here’s a close-up of the disk flowers (which are the only type of flowers) in a Texas thistle, Cirsium texanum. I took this photograph in May of 2007 in Great Hills Park, a nature preserve with an entrance just half a mile downhill from my house. This was one of those times when I used flash even in broad daylight; that way I could stop my 100 mm macro lens down as far as it would go, to f/32, in order to keep as many details in focus as possible.

© 2011 Steven Schwartzman