A closer look at poverty weed’s flowers
Click for greater clarity.
Here’s a closer look at Baccharis neglecta‘s flowers, of which there was no poverty at McKinney Falls State Park on October 1. The whole bush was like this section, with flowers so dense that the aroma coming from them was hard to take.
© 2012 Steven Schwartzman
Portraits of Wildflowers 
Is this the plant that grows as a small shrub in the hill country? I saw lots of the some kind of shrubby looking plant coming out of Austin, going toward Burnet and Marble Falls along the highway that goes north.
petspeopleandlife
October 20, 2012 at 7:48 PM
There are indeed lots of these in the Texas Hill Country, and they’re at their fluffy peak now, so this may well be what you observed. The previous post gives more of an overview, which may help you decide if that’s what you saw.
Steve Schwartzman
October 20, 2012 at 8:45 PM
Nature in all her prolific glory.
mary mageau
October 21, 2012 at 5:57 AM
Good word, prolific.
Steve Schwartzman
October 21, 2012 at 8:19 AM
Those colors are almost exactly what I chose when I painted my living and dining rooms. Martha Stewart called them “heavy cream” and “dusty sage”, but she probably didn’t know about baccharis neglecta. Again, the density and repetition remind me of William Morris. Lovely.
A week from today, I’ll be hiking the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Chase County, Kansas, the setting for Least Heat-Moon’s Prairy Erth. A week from tomorrow, I’m going to be hiking Konza Prairie with a fellow who’s a docent there. He happens to be a third cousin of the wife of a Kansas blogger I follow. Who says the interwebz aren’t magic?
shoreacres
October 21, 2012 at 10:50 AM
I wonder what your living and dining rooms would feel like if the walls were painted not just with these colors but with these flowers and leaves as well. Probably hard to take, I’ll grant you.
Happy hiking in those Kansas prairies. Given the advanced season up there compared to down here, I expect you’ll see some delicious grass seed heads. I also expect that whatever you find will make its way into one or more of your posts later this year. Buen viaje.
Steve Schwartzman
October 21, 2012 at 11:18 AM
I was very taken with this photograph, and now the exchange between you and shoreacres amplifies that–and I found the comparison to William Morris quite to the point, I must say. I would love to go to the Tallgrass Prairies one day. I do hope shoreacres will report back to us!
Susan Scheid
October 23, 2012 at 7:51 PM
It’s clear that William Morris was very much influenced by forms and patterns from nature; I became aware of his decorative borders in around 1990. I seem to remember that he came up in blog comments in the past year, but I don’t recall the specifics. I fully expect Shoreacres will write at least one article about her experience of the prairie(s) in Kansas. Like you, I’m looking forward to reading what she’ll say. In my own blog I’ve made sure to include plenty of photographs from the prairie side of Austin. Our prairies are our most endangered type of ecosystem.
Steve Schwartzman
October 23, 2012 at 8:08 PM
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