Fluff amounting to something

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On September 10, as I was driving east on Brushy Creek Rd. in Cedar Park, I saw something that caused me to turn around, go back to Brushy Creek Lake Park, and take a short hike: it was Clematis drummondii in all its fluffy glory. At the eastern end of the park there’s a popular biking/jogging/walking trail that goes across the earthen dam that created the lake, and on one side of that trail a barbed wire fence separates the public land from the private. It was along that divide for a distance of a couple of hundred feet that I saw mounds of Clematis drummondii festooning the fence in various shades of gray and tan and in various densities, at times obscuring it entirely. You can’t make out any details of the fence in this picture, but you can clearly infer it behind the dense and upright Clematis. Such is the power of one “old man’s beard” to conceal, and of a camera held close to another to reveal.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman

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