Two steps backwards

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In the last post you saw how a single seed of an antelope-horns milkweed, Asclepias asperula, gets carried away from its point of origin as intended, but not always with the best of landings. Before that you saw an array of seeds and fluff in their last minutes of contact with the pod that nursed them. The chaos of that release is in contrast to what came before it, which I didn’t mention then but which I would be remiss in not telling you about now. The truth is that the seeds develop in an interwoven, tightly packaged, and quite orderly way. In this picture you see a drying pod and the breeze as they’ve just begun conspiring to turn order into disorder.

I took this picture on June 25, 2011, in the same meadow that got mowed to the ground half a year later but that recovered in the spring of this year. For those of you who are interested in photography as a craft, points 1, 2, 4, 6 and 18 in About My Techniques are relevant to this photograph.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman