A wider view of dense bluebonnets

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By coincidence, my wife Eve has been attending a three-day seminar at the J.J. Pickle Research Campus, the place outside of which I photographed a bluebonnet colony on March 26. When I went to pick her up there yesterday at 5 PM, I took a picture of an even larger colony of bluebonnets in a field inside the campus, so here’s a broader view than the one you saw in the last post.

This photograph has the distinction of being the first one I’ve ever shown here that I took on my iPhone 4s. I’m not about to abandon my fancy DSLR (digital single-lens reflex camera), but I think you’ll agree that the phone did a pretty good job. It even attached the latitude, longitude, and altitude of the location (30,23.27N, 97,43.67W, 243.00 m), though it didn’t record the scent of the bluebonnets. Guess we’ll have to wait for the iPhone 5 for that feature.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman

Dense bluebonnets

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In the picture that you saw two days ago of colorful wildflowers on an embankment of the expressway called Mopac, bluebonnets played the smallest role. But bluebonnets, Lupinus texensis, are also known to form dense colonies, and to prove it here’s a photograph of a group of them I found on Burnet Rd. outside the J.J. Pickle Research Campus shortly after I left the Mopac site on March 26.

When it comes to the blue in bluebonnets, the rods and cones in my eyes have always seen the color as more violet or purple than blue. I talked about the same color discrepancy last year when I showed pictures of bluebells. Of course colors fall along a continuum, and different people draw different dividing lines between adjacent colors in the spectrum. I’ll add that no matter what you call the color of these flowers, when they occur in large numbers they give off a distinctive and heady scent: you can even buy bluebonnet perfume, bluebonnet eau de toilette, etc.; just do an Internet search and you’ll see.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman