Snow in Texas in August

Okay, so afternoon temperatures are still in the 90s (30s C), but by the week before last the snow-on-the-mountain plants (Euphorbia marginata) in central Texas had already begun flowering. I photographed the ones shown here alongside a pond in the town of Cedar Park yesterday. All the attractive white comes from bracts; the inconspicuous flowers are much too small to see unless you get a lot closer.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

Tulip poplar

While on the grounds of the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, on June 20 I saw some tulip poplar trees, Liriodendron tulipifera. Their leaves have a distinctively simple yet pleasing shape, don’t you think?

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

Rudbeckia to the max

Yet another thing I saw on the grounds of the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, on June 20 was Rudbeckia maxima, known as giant coneflower, great coneflower, and large or giant brown-eyed susan. In contrast to the regular brown-eyed susan, Rudbeckia hirta, this one produces flower stalks that can grow to be 7 ft. tall.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

Like a sand dune

It may look as if this little metallic green bee had come to rest on the crest of a sand dune with a desert storm threatening to blow in from beyond. Actually the landing place was the heel of my left hand, which with difficulty I twisted around to make the bee parallel to the sensor in the camera that I held in my right hand and took photographs with. (Oh, unorthodox me, but I did get pictures of the bee.)

Like the last several photographs, this one is from the grounds of the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, on June 20.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

What made the nonagons

Click for larger size and greater detail.

I believe that light refracted by drops of water caught in the spider’s web you saw last time made the glass elements in my 100mm macro lens produce the nonagonal artifacts that you also saw. What you didn’t see was the drops, so here’s another photograph from the same session at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, on June 20. Notice that some of the nonagons in this second photograph are elongated.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

Spider and polygons in the morning

Another thing I saw on the grounds of the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, on June 20 was this tiny spider, the main part of which my 100mm macro lens resolved quite nicely. The morning sun in front of me lit up some strands of silk in the web while also causing the lens to create polygonal artifacts of light. Those nonagons have better definition than the red ones I showed you in 2013.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

I know more about cosh than cohosh

I know more about cosh* than cohosh. That said, on the way back home from the Midwest we stopped for a couple of nights in Bentonville, Arkansas, to visit the Crystal Bridges Museum for a second time, and on the museum’s landscaped grounds on June 20th I photographed some appealing flowers and buds of black cohosh, Actaea racemosa var. racemosa. The genus name was formerly Cimicifuga, which means ‘makes bedbugs go away,’ and an alternate common name is bugbane, but whether black cohosh really has that property, I don’t know.

If you’re interested in the craft of photography, I’ll add that in taking this picture I made good use of point 4 in About My Techniques. The fact that a shaft of sunlight illuminated the black cohosh inflorescence amplified the contrast between black and white. Points 1, 2, and 18 also came into play.

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* In trigonometry, cosh is the hyperbolic cosine.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

Killdeer

At Illinois Beach State Park on June 14th we noticed a lot of clutter in one place, as you see in the first photograph. Flitting in and out of that clutter was a bird that I learned is a killdeer, Charadrius vociferus.

The “cage” of dead branches rising from the beach sand obviously wasn’t natural but had been placed there by people. When we got closer we could guess at the reason for the uprights: to mark the killdeer’s nest and keep walkers from accidentally treading on it, given how easily a passerby might take the eggs for just a few more stones out of the thousands on the beach.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

Minuartia michauxii var. michauxii

This post’s title is a mouthful. Only a little better are the common names Michaux’s stitchwort and Michaux’s sandwort. One article notes that the plant “is a gorgeous low-growing ground cover for dry, sandy, or rocky soils in full sun from New Hampshire to Virginia, with a disjunct population in the dunes around Lake Michigan.” Sure enough, I took today’s photograph at Illinois Beach State Park on June 7th.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

No dulcimer, but a damsel*

This damselfly was tiny, and much tinier still were the colorful parasitic mites on it.

Today’s photograph comes from July 21 along the upper reaches of Bull Creek.

UPDATE: On August 28th a person at BugGuide.net identified this damselfly as a male Argia translata, known as a dusky dancer.

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* The reference in the title is to the last part of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman