Separate but equal – reposted from this morning

Click for greater size and clarity.

On March 31, Eve and I drove close to a 300-mile circuit south of Austin to see what wildflowers we could see. And see them we did, stopping repeatedly to appreciate the profusion along the roadsides and in adjacent fields in this spring of normal rain after a year of drought. The first stop was along US 183 south of Luling, and it produced today’s picture.

The red, as you saw a couple of days ago in the median of Loop 360, comes from Indian paintbrushes, Castilleja indivisa. The yellow wildflowers in the background make their first appearance in this blog: they’re Texas dandelions, Pyrrhopappus pauciflorus. These are native here, as opposed to the dandelions from Europe that have spread across much of North America, including the lawns of the New York suburb I grew up in.

It’s common in Texas to find dense mixtures of wildflowers—again as you saw a couple of posts back—but sometimes two species colonize the same terrain mostly separately, as on this plot of ground, where there were only a few dandelions among the Indian paintbrushes and vice versa.

NOTE: Because of a problem this morning in which some subscription e-mails didn’t go out, I’m following the advice of a WordPress “Happiness Engineer” and reposting this. If you received the original e-mail, I’m sorry for the duplication.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman

Subscription e-mail problem today

If you didn’t receive your usual subscription e-mail this morning and have come here to the website to find out whether there’s a new post—there is, see below—please be aware that WordPress is having a problem. Some other bloggers are also reporting that their subscription e-mails didn’t go out this morning.

You may recall that a recent post included the story of the strange visions and dreams of Josiah Wilbarger and Sarah Hornsby. I can’t report anything so dramatic, but when I woke up around 6 o’clock this morning I realized that I had just been dreaming. In my dream I was at an airport, presumably Austin’s, although it didn’t look like ours. I was wandering around outdoors at that airport, and for some reason no passengers were allowed to leave the grounds. I remember thinking: “Why can’t we leave here and go home?” Maybe in my dream the other passengers and I were playing the parts of the imprisoned e-mails that should already have gone out to you but hadn’t yet been able to (and still haven’t, as I write this).

Separate but equal

Click for greater size and clarity.

On March 31, Eve and I drove close to a 300-mile circuit south of Austin to see what wildflowers we could see. And see them we did, stopping repeatedly to appreciate the profusion along the roadsides and in adjacent fields in this spring of normal rain after a year of drought. The first stop was along US 183 south of Luling, and it produced today’s picture.

The red, as you saw a couple of days ago in the median of Loop 360, comes from Indian paintbrushes, Castilleja indivisa. The yellow wildflowers in the background make their first appearance in this blog: they’re Texas dandelions, Pyrrhopappus pauciflorus. These are native here, as opposed to the dandelions from Europe that have spread across much of North America, including the lawns of the New York suburb I grew up in.

It’s common in Texas to find dense mixtures of wildflowers—again as you saw a couple of posts back—but sometimes two species colonize the same terrain mostly separately, as on this plot of ground, where there were only a few dandelions among the Indian paintbrushes and vice versa.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman