Fragrance where you don’t normally find it

In my experience, daisy-type flowers almost never have a fragrance. Here’s one that does, and it also has a strange common name: nerve-ray. Botanists know it as Tetragonotheca texana. A tetragon is a four-angled figure: Greek tetra = four and gon = angle; theca = a place to put something, a receptacle, a case. In the first photograph, you have no trouble seeing the green tetragon behind the flower head’s yellow rays.

 

Before the flower heads of this species open, their buds justify the description of them as four-angled cases:

I took these photographs beneath the power lines west of Morado Circle on April 17th.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman