Inside a white prickly poppy

Click for greater clarity.

Two posts back you saw white prickly poppies, Argemone albiflora, in a large and dense colony. Then you got a close view of the outside of one of the poppy’s diaphanous petals. Now let’s float up and over, then hover to look straight down into the center of one of these poppies. Beyond the obvious appeal of the ball of yellow-orange stamens and the dark red patterns on the stigma at their center, notice the characteristic crinkling of the flower’s delicate white petals.

For those of you interested in photography as a craft, points 1, 9, and the recently added 22 in About My Techniques are relevant to this image. If you’d like to see the many places where white prickly poppies grow, you can visit the USDA website.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman