Banking on an embankment

Click for considerably greater size and clarity.

The photo session from June 6 that brought you the very close and almost monochromatic view of a white prickly poppy petal in the southern part of Great Hills Park now brings you this colorful landscape. Running across the top of the embankment shown here is Floral Park Dr., the street that leads into my neighborhood, but I went far enough down the slope and got close enough to the ground that you can’t see the guard rail or any cars passing by. The prominent flowers in the foreground are Mexican hats, Ratibida columnifera. The variation in ray color between yellow and reddish-brown is just that, a variation within the same species. I showed closeups of this type of wildflower on November 15 and December 28, in case you’d like to be reminded of the details.

Since I moved to my Great Hills neighborhood eight years ago, this embankment has been a good place for wildflowers—except when the city has mowed everything down prematurely. (I wonder if they also mow down the wildflowers on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario; the shape of the clouds in the center of today’s photo reminds me of what that part of the lake looks like on a map.)

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Posted on this date last year: a panoramic view of a colony of bluebells in the same sump that I returned to this year for the recent picture of bluebells with stormclouds.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman