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This morning I got a notification from WordPress saying: “Congratulations on writing 1,337 total posts on Portraits of Wildflowers.” Not 1,000 or 2,000 or 1,500 or even 1,300, but precisely 1,337. I may be in my prime, but 1,337 isn’t even a prime number, because it factors into 7 x 191. Inscrutable are the ways of WP.

Now that you’ve been inveigled by a number, I’d better give you something botanical. Here’s some powerful purple in a mostly soft picture of that anything-but-soft plant you saw last time, eryngo, Eryngium leavenworthii, viewed from the top down. The location was once again the Elisabet Ney Museum on August 28.

© 2014 Steven Schwartzman

It’s time again for those little purple false thistly pineapply thingies

So there I was at the Elisabet Ney Museum on August 28th, as you’ve heard a bunch of times. Not far from the Maximilian sunflowers, and contrasting nicely with their yellow, were the purple flower heads of an eryngo, Eryngium leavenworthii. Despite appearances, this plant isn’t related to pineapples or thistles but is in the same botanical family as carrots, parsley, and celery. Just because eryngo isn’t a thistle doesn’t mean its spines don’t hurt. They do.

© 2014 Steven Schwartzman