It hasn’t been a fantabulous wildflower spring here, but this is still Texas

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Even though this hasn’t been the kind of spring we had in 2010 and 2012, with broad displays of dense wildflowers in many places, this is still Texas, and at least some floral panoramas have been visited upon us. You see one here. The plants with all the white flowers and buds atop them were part of a large colony of old plainsman, Hymenopappus scabiosaeus, a species that has been having a banner year (and coincidentally one making its debut in these pages today). If you’d stood where I did when I took this picture, old plainsman would have surrounded you; contained within that huge stand was a smaller—and necessarily lower—one of prairie verbena, Glandularia bipinnatifida, whose purple flowers color the near half of the photograph. As for the yellow flowers in the lower right, you’ll get a better look at that species in another post.

Date: April 12.  Location: the southwest corner of Corral Ln. and I-35 in south Austin, a place I’d never photographed till that day. Because the property fronts the Interstate, someone will eventually build on that land, but at least for this year I got to spend over an hour with the wildflowers there.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman