Wildflowers along Mopac

Mopac, named for the Missouri-Pacific railroad whose tracks it partly runs alongside, is a north-south expressway on the west side of Austin. For hours each morning and again each afternoon from Monday through Friday it’s jammed up, but not on Sunday mornings. That’s the time on May 5th when I went to the embankment at the northeast corner of Mopac and Braker Lane to photograph the dense wildflowers I’d enjoyed seeing there in April and May in other years and again this spring. The mostly red flower heads are Gaillardia pulchella, known as firewheels, Indian blankets, and blanketflowers. The mostly yellow flower heads are Thelesperma filifolium, called greenthread because of the plant’s thread-like leaves.

The astute viewer will have noticed (as some writers used to put it) the contrast between the flowerful embankment that fills two-thirds of the photograph, and the bare one on the other side of the highway. I don’t recall whether that opposite embankment had looked as good as the near one; I do know that just a few days earlier I saw mowers cutting down all the wildflowers on that side of Mopac farther south, in the vicinity of Far West Blvd. I’d been planning to photograph there but didn’t make it. Fortunately I was in time to catch this display on the east side of the highway. Below is another view, now in my usual way, which is to say without any human elements. The bits of white are gaura, Oenothera sp., and the darker flowers are Mexican hats, Ratibida columnifera, a strange one of which you saw in the previous post.

UPDATE: When I drove past this intersection three days later, on May 8th, I found that all the wildflowers on the east side of the highway, the ones you see above, had been mowed down.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman