Mealy blue sage and cloud

Click for greater clarity.

About two hours before I took the last post’s picture, with its ominous sky that somehow failed to produce more than a minute of almost imperceptible drizzle, I saw the tamer sky and soft cloud shown in this post’s photograph. The wildflowers are Salvia farinacea, known as mealy blue sage, and on May 31 there were plenty of them on a portion of the Texas Department of Transportation property in north-central Austin. The view from the street of another part of the property had brought me there that morning to photograph a later stage of the large colony of firewheels you saw in the post of May 11, but this time I also wandered a lot farther back and saw (and happily smelled) all the sages.

To avoid including distracting things in the background, I knelt, hunched over so that my head was near the ground, and did my best to aim upward and frame the picture even though I was straining to see clearly through the camera’s viewfinder.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman