Going back two years twice, take two

This morning I promised you updates of two articles from two years ago. This second one appeared in a series of guest posts that featured me as the guest. Being a guest poster in your own blog may sound strange (or perhaps strangeness is something you’d expect from this writer), but at the end of June 2012 I’d gone on vacation to New York and Massachusetts, places where I was a stranger in a strange land, botanically speaking. Now you understand (I hope) how I got away with calling myself a guest poster in my own blog.

In the fourth installment of my guest postings I showed a dense colony of Erigeron annuus, or eastern daisy fleabane, that I saw at Bartholomew’s Cobble near the southwestern corner of Massachusetts on June 29, 2012. In the following post I’d originally shown a closeup with a beetle on those flowers, but the insect turned out to be a Japanese beetle, which obviously isn’t native to Massachusetts. Here, then, is a closeup of an eastern daisy fleabane sans invasive beetle.

If you’d like to look at a closeup of the main species of Erigeron that grows in central Texas you can; you’ll get to see a tiny native visitor as a bonus and in the process boost your IQ (insect quota).

© 2012, 2014 Steven Schwartzman

Going back two years twice

As this blog enters its fourth year, I’ll point out that 4 = 2 x 2, so I’d like to go back and correct two mistakes I made two years ago. That’s right, today I’m going to offer you updates, complete with a replacement photograph in each, of two articles from 2012. Most of you have never seen either post, and none of you have seen the replacement pictures, so happy new/old to you. Here’s the first:

Soon after the original version of this post was published on April 19th, 2012, Sue Wiseman alerted me to the fact that the plant in the post’s picture wasn’t really a dwarf dandelion at all, but Hedypnois cretica, an increasingly common European invasive, referred to descriptively based on its origin and botanical family as a Cretan composite. I’ve now replaced that photograph with one I took of an actual dwarf dandelion on a field trip to Bastrop State Park led by botanist Bill Carr on April 27, 2014. There’s nothing like having an expert with you to identify plants.

I suspect that even in areas where these little flowers are common, many people are unaware of dwarf dandelions, which botanists place in the genus Krigia (this one being K. oppositifolia). As John and Gloria Tveten write in Wildflowers of Houston: “While these tiny plants do not attract attention when alone, they frequently form large, showy colonies that blanket sandy fields or roadsides.”

© 2012, 2014 Steven Schwartzman