Purple bindweed vine and leaf

Ipomoea cordatotriloba; click for greater detail.

Yesterday’s post used an out-of-focus flower of Ipomoea cordatotriloba to frame the much tinier flowers of scarlet spiderling. Today I’ll focus on the Ipomoea, whose most common names, purple bindweed and tievine, identify the species as a twining vine. On the right side of this picture you see one making a cylindrical spiral as it twines its way up a stalk of dry grass. To the left of the spiral, and of course attached to it, is one of the plant’s small leaves, which sometimes have the shape of a stylized heart; mentally fold down the opposite and symmetric side of the leaf, turn your imagination 90° to the right, and you may be able to see one of those stylized hearts, though a heart with so pointy a tip has never beat inside a living chest. Both the vine and the leaf stalk have fine hairs growing on them, as you can see with no recourse to imagination, but perhaps with recourse to the larger version of the image that springs from the smaller one when it’s clicked. The two colorful circles partly visible behind the folded leaf are purple bindweed flowers some distance away. (What, has he no shame, using the same device two pictures in a row?)

I took this photograph on August 17 at Austin’s Elisabet Ney Museum, whose grounds are being restored to a native prairie. The picture is one of twelve that are on display at the museum. For those interested in photography as a craft, points 1, 2, and 5 in About My Techniques are relevant to today’s photograph. For more information about Ipomoea cordatotriloba, including a clickable map showing the places in the southeastern United States where it grows, you can visit the USDA website.

© 2011 Steven Schwartzman

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