Corn salad

Why anyone would call this plant corn salad, I don’t know. I do know that a colony of Valerianella amarella can cover a good expanse of ground in meadows and on prairies, yet individual flowers are tiny, only 1/16 to 1/8 of an inch across (1.5–3 mm). They often grow in a loosely rectangular array comprising two pairs of clusters: call it white geometry and you’ll get no argument from me. The second picture looks straight down at one pair of clusters. I noticed that the ant burrowed into the center of several of the flowers, and I conjectured, rightly or wrongly, that it was going after nectar. There’s no need to conjecture about what I was going after—photographs—nor about their provenance—an area along Yaupon Dr. on March 20.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman