Cenizo

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Here’s something you haven’t seen in these pages till now: Leucophyllum frutescens, a shrub or small tree that’s native across portions of the southern third of Texas but is widely planted in many other places for its great displays of flowers. Those flowers are small and last only a few days before falling to the ground, but they often appear in large numbers, as you see here, and there are usually several rounds of blossoming each year, beginning once the temperature gets hot. One of the common names for this bush is cenizo, a Spanish word based on the ceniza that means ash, because the plant’s small leaves are an ash-gray shade of green. I photographed this cenizo on the front lawn of a house in my neighborhood on May 24.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman