Wildflowers in the wind

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Yes, the wind was blowing yesterday afternoon when I got out of my car near Mopac and Braker Ln. to take pictures of some dense wildflowers on the embankment of the highway. You may remember that in early February, before an unfortunate mowing, precocious spring wildflowers had already been coming up on the median and embankments of the expressway.

One kind of flower that got mowed down then was Thelesperma filifolium, known as greenthread because of the thread-like segments of the plant’s leaves. On February 8th I showed you a greenthread bud that I’d photographed before the mowing. I later said that these are among the most common wildflowers in Austin, and that most likely they’d grow back along Mopac, even in the same places where they’d gotten mowed down.

Well, here we are seven weeks later, and the greenthreads have indeed come back. In the picture above, they’re the many flowers you see with yellow rays surrounding smaller brown disks. The mostly red flower heads are called firewheels or Indian blankets, Gaillardia pulchella, of which you saw an early one opening in the post of February 23. The bluish-purple flowers are bluebonnets, Lupinus texensis, making their first appearance in this blog.

This is the kind of wildflower display Texas is duly famous for!

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman