A close view of stork’s bill

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Here’s a close look at a stork’s bill flower, Erodium texanum, with another one mostly hidden behind it. The location was Pedernales Falls State Park, a few miles away from where I took the previous picture showing a stork’s bill colony on March 27. Note the stylized red star at the flower’s center.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman

A different purple

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You’ve already seen phlox in these pages, and although I haven’t shown examples of all the colors it can come in, one that I did show is purple. Another purple springtime wildflower in Texas is stork’s bill, Erodium texanum, which like so many other species had a good year in 2012. Here you see a colony of them mixed in with Indian paintbrushes. While this species of paintbrush, Castilleja indivisa, is usually red or red-orange, the colony in today’s photograph shows that there are occasional variants whose color is a pale salmon or a creamy off-white.

I photographed this roadside scene on March 27 east of Johnson City, Texas. The town was named after forebears of Lyndon Johnson, whose wife became a co-founder of what is now called the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. The stork’s bill was named after its seed capsules, which are long and slender.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman