Not yet lost

Diagonally across Heatherwilde Blvd. from the piece of prairie I mentioned last time in Pflugerville that recently became a construction site is the still natural piece you see here. How long it will keep looking like this I don’t know, because signs indicate that the land is the future home of a high school.

In the meantime, gaze upon the splendor of this dense colony of clasping-leaf coneflowers, Dracopis amplexicaulis, as it looked on May 20. It was the best stand of this species I’d seen since I began documenting native plants in 1999, and there were other substantial parts of the colony outside the frame of this image. Thank you, Blackland Prairie.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman