Ice and flowers minutes apart

After I spent 75 minutes on January 5th taking pictures of frostweed ice in Great Hills Park, I went a few blocks away to Morado Circle and photographed some of the flower heads on a goldeneye bush, Viguiera dentata. The overnight dip below freezing didn’t seem to have hurt the flowers at all, but continuing cold mornings over the next two weeks did apparently bring about the demise of almost all the flower heads, because when I checked the bush several days ago I found just two.

The leaflets behind the goldeneye flower head in this picture were from a flameleaf sumac, Rhus lanceolata, that somehow managed to hang on to its foliage into January.

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman