Whorl of windflower leaves

Click for greater clarity.

And here’s the whorl of leaves that encircles the midsection of an Anemone berlandieri flower stalk. If you say you see stylized flames shooting up, I won’t object.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman

Purple and white at the same time

Here are two flowers of Anemone berlandieri with a mixture of the colors you’ve seen separately in posts showing a white anemone and a purple anemone. Unlike those two flowers, which had already opened fully or almost fully and which I viewed from above, these were still only beginning to open, and I put my head near the ground to look at them from below. Note the yellow tinge in the areas where each stem adjoins its sepals. There are also fine hairs on the stems and sepals, though it may be hard for you to see them in an image of this size. And speaking of difficulty, that’s what I often encounter in trying to keep two objects in focus at the same time when they’re at slightly different distances from the camera’s lens—and in this case when there was limited light and the wind was blowing intermittently. Because of those problems, I took a bunch of photographs from varying positions to increase the chances of getting a reasonably good image. This is one of a few that I felt came out all right.

I took this picture on the morning of February 23 in the same place in northwest Austin where, exactly two weeks earlier, I photographed the white anemone, the blue curls, the agarita, and the false dayflower that you’ve recently seen.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman