When pink is white

Last June, after arriving home from a sight-filled trip to the Chicago area, I wondered if it was too late for the season’s mountain pinks (Centaurium beyrichii) back in Austin. It wasn’t, as I showed in a post entitled “I would have missed them if I’d missed them.” This year, after we returned from our latest American road odyssey, I wondered the same thing. On June 21st I went out to check the likely places along Capital of Texas Highway, which swings a big arc through the hilly country on the west side of Austin. Although I found the expected mountain pinks, they looked a bit past their prime, or possibly 2017 was a meager year for them. Still, I did take some pictures, and while I was doing so a young Chinese guy walked by and asked if I’d seen the naturally white variant of mountain pinks nearby. When I asked where, he pointed and said they were about a hundred feet down the road. He walked on, and I went in the opposite direction, to the place he’d indicated. Sure enough, I found several mountain pink plants with white flowers.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman