Hill Country colors

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On April 11th I was driving in Llano County in the Texas Hill Country when I pulled over to see a dense display of wildflowers on the side of a country road. I mostly photographed the flowers with no intermediary, but also through the filter of what I took to be rock-cress plants, Arabis petiolaris, with their distinctive upright seed pods.

Almost all of the red flowers were Indian paintbrushes, Castilleja indivisa, which you’ve seen several times in these pages this season. The yellow flowers with brown centers joining the rock-cress for a first appearance in this blog were brown bitterweed, Helenium amarum var. badium, which can form dense colonies on their own as well as in conjunction with other species of wildflowers, as here.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman