A bud beginning to unroll

Bud unrolling; click for greater detail.

While driving past a construction site in the Hill Country west of Austin yesterday, I was pleased to find several native plants of a certain species that I see from time to time, but not all that often. The plants had some fully open flowers, but they also had some long, narrow buds that were just beginning to unroll. That was the case with the bud shown here, which I photographed looking straight down from the top. For once I won’t tell you what this is—though some of you may recognize it—but next time I’ll show you how different a fully open flower of this species looks from the roughly cylindrical bud you see before you, which was about an inch and a half across and about six inches long. For those of you who don’t know what this is, see if you can imagine what the emerging flower will be like; to my mind, it’s like trying to figure out what a butterfly will look like from its caterpillar.

Till tomorrow, then.

© 2011 Steven Schwartzman