A nerve-ray bud

Click for greater size and clarity.

Yesterday’s post mentioned that nerve-ray, Tetragonotheca texana, is a wildflower whose buds are noticeably four-sided. That’s 100% true, even if today’s picture shows you only 50% of the sides. Each pair of sides meets at an angle and forms a noticeable seam along the juncture. You can see three of those ridges here: the one that follows the line of the flower stalk, and the two that outline the left and right contours of the bud. Behind this bud is a fully open flower head of the same species.

Date: April 9.  Place: the right-of-way beneath the power lines that run across a part of my Great Hills neighborhood in Austin.

Posted on this date last year, in the middle of the drought, when Austin had already had 43 days on which the temperature reached at least 100°: a photograph showing how flowerful the spring of 2010 had been.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman