Basket-flower in two stages

On May 26th, before I photographed the colony of basket-flowers (Plectocephalus americanus) in Pflugerville that you’ve already seen, I’d stopped on Burnet Rd. by the old Merrilltown Cemetery in far north Austin to check out the basket-flowers I’ve come to count on each spring stretched out along a roadside ditch and at the edge of the property next to the cemetery. While wind made my work difficult, I did get some good pictures of a developing basket-flower “basket” in front of a fully open flower head of the same species. I don’t recall making a portrait like this one in my two decades of photographing basket-flowers, so the picture pleases me in its own right and because of its novelty.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman