Red and yellow

The flower heads of Gaillardia pulchella, known as firewheels and Indian blankets, are red with yellow fringes. The flowers of Lindheimera texana, called Texas yellow stars, bear only the color of their common name. (A post from 2012 afforded you a much closer look at yellow stars.)

Mixed in among the colony of firewheels were some specimens of a native plant that most of you won’t know: Dracopis amplexicaulis, called clasping-leaf coneflower. Its flower heads look like those of the brown-eyed (or black-eyed) susan and the Mexican hat, but the leaves are quite different and really do clasp the plant’s stems.

These views are from Bull Creek Rd. across from Jackson Ave. on April 14. I took pictures on this plot last year and couldn’t help noticing it was surrounded by yellow caution tape. I’d hypothesized that people had put the tape up to keep mowers from destroying all those wildflowers. This year a man saw me photographing there and came over to talk with me. He said he and some of his friends from the nursing home across the street created the wildflower garden and he confirmed that they surrounded it with caution tape to keep the mowers from destroying what anyone with half an ounce of common sense would know not to mow down (the editorializing is mine, but we agreed on the need for the tape).

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman