Skeleton-plant flower base

Lygodesmia texana: click to enlarge.

You are looking at the base—and an architectural one it is—of a flower head of Lygodesmia texana. This member of the sunflower family is often called the skeleton-plant because its slender and rising stem lacks obvious leaves. What the two little spheres on the leftmost green bract are, I don’t know. I do know that I made this photograph at Austin’s Elisabet Ney Museum, whose grounds are being restored to a native prairie, and that the brown in the background is a token of all the vegetation parched by the continuing drought. I also know that in the next post you’ll find out what a skeleton-plant flower head looks like when seen from above.

For more information about Lygodesmia texana, including a clickable map showing the states in the United States where this species grows, you can visit the USDA websiste. For more information about the approaches that went into the making of this photograph, see points 1, 2, 4, 5, and 14 in About My Techniques.

© 2011 Steven Schwartzman