Fall foliage upside down

As we bid an official goodbye to autumn today, let me look back—and upside down—at some pastel fall foliage in Lake Fort Smith State Park, Arkansas, on November 10. I’m no painter, but I can imagine how scenes likes this of trees reflected in water influenced the Impressionists.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

Pretty poison, differently grown and differently hued

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In the last post you saw some poison ivy, Toxicodendron radicans, growing as a lush vine on a tree trunk. This protean plant also has the potential to develop into a forb, and that’s the form you’re seeing a bunch of here. These poison ivy plants were especially colorful, with leaves going well beyond yellow and turning conspicuously red.

Today’s photograph comes from Great Northern Blvd.* on a cold and windy December 6th. I willingly put up with the bad weather for a chance to photograph poison ivy looking more colorful than I’d seen it in years. Sweet are the uses of adversity, no?

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* Work has just begun on the addition of a fourth (and first tolled) lane in each direction on the expressway called Mopac. From what I’ve read in the newspaper, a tall sound-deflecting wall is to be built, and that will almost certainly mean the destruction of all the native plants I’ve been photographing for several years now in the no-man’s-land (or better yet this-man’s-land) between Great Northern Blvd. and the railroad tracks running alongside Mopac (whose name comes from the Missouri Pacific Railroad). If you’d like to look back and see some of the photographs I’ve taken there in the last couple of years, you can. I don’t know how many more there will be.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

Pretty poison

Poison ivy, that is, Toxicodendron radicans. This protean plant can grow as a forb, a shrub, or, as you see in this photograph, a climbing vine. Regardless of its form, poison ivy is a reliable source not only of skin irritation but also of colorful fall foliage. The date was November 18, and the location US 183 in the town of Cedar Park, a large suburb immediately north of Austin.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

A wildflower in mid-December

Several recent freezing nights did away with many of the wildflowers in Austin, including two still-blooming sunflower plants along Mopac that I’d been keeping an eye on. Nevertheless, some wildflowers survived, and there are already even a few new ones. Yesterday afternoon, with the temperature in the 60s, I found this four-nerve daisy, Tetraneuris linearifolia, in the right-of-way beneath the power lines to the west of Morado Circle in my hilly part of town. Notice how the rays have begun curling down as the flower head matures.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

Western leaffooted bug

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Here’s a western leaffooted bug, Leptoglossus zonatus, on an evergreen sumac, Rhus virens. The red orbs out of focus in the background are the ripe little fruits of the sumac.

I took this picture on Misting Falls Trail in my neighborhood on November 13th. In a post early this year you saw a different insect on a differently colored evergreen sumac leaf, and this past spring you saw a group of Leptoglossus phyllopus bugs on a decomposing thistle.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

Talimena Scenic Drive

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On the way back to Austin from northwestern Arkansas on November 10, we passed through sections of the Ouachita National Forest in far eastern Oklahoma. At one point we traveled along a part of the Talimena Scenic Drive, which we’d never heard of, but later I looked it up and found a source that claims it’s the best place for fall foliage in the whole state of Oklahoma. Fortunately the woods were at their colorful peak when we drove through the area.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

A rattlebush pod closer up

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The last picture, taken in a field in Heavener, Oklahoma, on November 11th, showed a colony of rattlebush, Sesbania vesicaria, that had gone to seed and was drying out. Because that panoramic view included dozens of plants, you couldn’t see what an individual one looked like, nor why the species is also known as bagpod and bladderpod. This photo gives you a better look at one of the “bags” or “bladders” in which the dry seeds rattle around when shaken.

The scattered red in the background was from the ubiquitous sumac, while the yellow near the lower left came from some still-flowering goldenrod.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

Rattlebush colony drying out

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Another thing I encountered in a field in Heavener, Oklahoma, on November 11th was a colony of rattlebush that had gone to seed and dried out. I didn’t know what species it was, but in checking species distributions later I concluded it must have been Sesbania vesicaria. The common names rattlebush and rattlebox come from the fact that the drying seeds end up loose inside their pods and really do rattle around when the pods are shaken.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

Taverner, sojourner, heavener

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A taverner is someone who keeps a tavern and a sojourner is someone who makes a sojourn. Nothing strange there. But what, I wondered on November 10 as we drove south into the town of Heavener, Oklahoma, is a heavener?* I didn’t speculate long, though, because after I saw an undeveloped piece of ground with plenty of native plants on it off to my left, I spent 20 minutes scampering about to take pictures. The thing that had first caught my attention from the road was a few fluffy poverty weed bushes, but I could tell right away that they weren’t the same species that grows in central Texas and that I’ve showed a bunch of times in these pages. From previous readings I concluded that I was probably looking at Baccharis halimifolia, a species even more widely distributed—from eastern Texas to southern New England—than the B. neglecta I’m familiar with. Also unusual for me was seeing a poverty weed adjacent to a pine tree, a combination unknown in Austin. Notice some fading goldenrod in the foreground and a little of the ever-present sumac turning red in the distance.

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* It turns out that the town was named for Joseph H. Heavener, who Wikipedia says settled in the area about 1877. Now the question becomes: how did that family name originate?

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

From flame(leaf) to fire(wheel), followed by a (silver)puff to put out the flames

I recently began a collaboration with my friend Nikki Smith, an artist who lives in College Station. In her latest project, she’s taking inspiration from some photographs of mine and working her digital magic on them to create something strikingly different. Just last night the first and quite varied fruits of this project appeared, so I thought I’d show you the pair of results.

In the first case, the original was the photograph of a firewheel that appeared here in the early days of this blog, and which I’ve copied below. If you’d like, take a moment and see if you can imagine what an electrified transformation might look like, then click the photograph to see the change.

In the second case, the original showed a seedhead of silverpuff, below, which you can similarly click to see the transformation Nikki worked on it. Even though the two original photographs have similar compositions, the transformed views don’t resemble each other.

Happy imagining and viewing.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman