Eryngo meets hierba del marrano

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Yesterday you heard about my visit on August 8th to a pond adjacent to Naruna Dr. in northeast Austin. My walk around the pond included an encounter with two colonies that were encountering each other. The one that stands out in today’s photograph, literally and figuratively, is eryngo, Eryngium leavenworthii, a prickly plant whose mature flowers look like little purple pineapples, but at the stage I saw them they were still mostly a dull green. Some of the eryngo plants at the right, even though not far from the pond, were drying out in the summer heat.

Much of the greenery on the left side of the photograph is from Symphyotrichum subulatum, called baby’s breath aster, annual aster, eastern annual saltmarsh aster, and Blackland aster. The plant is also known by the Spanish name hierba del marrano, which I’ll translate loosely as pigweed. There were several stands of it, most of them independent, but here I found the mixing with the eryngo intriguing. As Dolly Parton wrote in the refrain of a song: “Wildflowers don’t care where they grow.”

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman