Stop and smell the nerve-ray

On September 12 along a trail following the upper reaches of Bull Creek I found a few late-in-the-season flower heads of Tetragonotheca* texana, known as nerve-ray or square-bud daisy (did you notice the green square?). While most species of yellow daisies—and there’s a slew of them in central Texas—don’t have much of a scent, this one is fragrant, so I always make myself stop and smell the nerve-ray.

In the United States the aptly named T. texana grows only in Texas. Travis County, where Austin is, marks the northeastern corner of the species’ range. Lucky us.

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* A tetragon is a four-angled figure: Greek tetra = 4 and gon = angle (and theca = a place to put something, a receptacle, a case). Notice that the more common Latin-derived word quadrilateral names the figure for its four sides rather than its four angles.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman