Shaffer Bend
The third of our three Bend stops on March 26th was Shaffer Bend. Already inside the park but before having driven all the way down to the Colorado River, I pulled over at this pleasant wildflower spot. The blue-indigo colony is Texas bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis). The violet-colored flowers are prairie verbena (Glandularia bipinnatifida). The yellow ones are husiache daisies (Amblyolepis setigera), which I have to go a bit west of Austin to see. The trees are mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa var. glandulosa).
Once we got down to the river, the still-low water from last year’s drought let me photograph bluebonnets in an environment where I rarely see them: sand. A few feet away, a tangle of dead cocklebur branches (Xanthium strumarium) lent itself to a more-is-more abstraction.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Portraits of Wildflowers 
I enjoyed the contrasting close-ups!
Birder's Journey
April 6, 2024 at 6:59 AM
You have an analytical mind.
Steve Schwartzman
April 6, 2024 at 8:46 AM
That field of flowers is beautiful.
circadianreflections
April 6, 2024 at 7:27 AM
It was an unexpected and welcome wildflower treat before getting all the way down to the river.
Steve Schwartzman
April 6, 2024 at 8:48 AM
very good
VICTOR PETER Matcham
April 6, 2024 at 8:29 AM
I won’t contradict what you said.
Steve Schwartzman
April 6, 2024 at 9:28 AM
After reviewing the last three posts of The Bends, I’m suffering from Texas Bluebonnet withdrawal. When we lived in San Angelo and San Antonio, we would schedule Bluebonnet outings. Picnics in the Hill Country are still a precious memory.
Florida has a healthy population of Lupine species (although they are currently going through a taxonomic kerfuffle), but the displays are nothing like the Lone Star stars of the spring flower show.
Wally Jones
April 6, 2024 at 9:15 AM
Ah yes, these posts would understandably bend your mind back to happy experiences in nature from your time in Texas. Sorry you can’t schedule any outings with bluebonnets now, at least not unless you’re willing to drive for several days or take a plane.
I’ve written that bluebonnets are “done to death” here, with lots of kitschy paraphernalia commercializing them. Of course that’s not the bluebonnets’ fault, so I’m still happy to celebrate them in my own ways. Over the past month we’ve been to at least as many good colonies of them as in any other year. Yesterday we explored one colony along Lake Buchanan in which the beginning of the end of the season for them was finally apparent, with the plants showing some fading and drying out.
One more Bend post tomorrow.
Steve Schwartzman
April 6, 2024 at 9:26 AM
It’s beautiful at this time of the year, isn’t it?
Pit
April 6, 2024 at 3:22 PM
It sure is. I heard online that the Willow City Loop isn’t good this year, which perhaps means that the bluebonnets in your area weren’t at their best. The places around Austin have been fabulous.
Steve Schwartzman
April 6, 2024 at 6:41 PM
Your bluebonnets-in-sand photo reminded me of a cluster I found growing out of a crack in a rock on the Willow City loop. It’s a good reminder of how hardy the plants are; it doesn’t seem to take much to make them happy. That mesquite grove is almost exactly the color of the trees I found in the Moulton area: an almost 1950-ish chartreuse.
Speaking of the end of the season, when I took a good look at my recent photos from the Somerville area, I was surprised to find them filled with fully formed bluebonnet seeds: evidence of the bloom that you found somewhat earlier. They’re well covered with grasses and other forbs now, and I didn’t notice them until I looked at the photos.
shoreacres
April 6, 2024 at 4:40 PM
Your ‘bend’ posts bent my mind back to Claude Esteban’s poem “The Bend.” I couldn’t find a way to include it here without a space between each line, so I’ll link to it instead. It’s delightful; the last three lines certainly brought a smile.
shoreacres
April 6, 2024 at 4:56 PM
A French poet bearing as his last name the Spanish version of my first: naturally I had to look up the original French poem (and that web page coincidentally includes the same English translation you linked on a different site). My French poetry studies largely ended more than half a century ago, so I hadn’t heard of Claude Esteban, who I see lived from 1935 to 2006.
The translator’s note says “I opted to translate ‘papillon,’ which normally is a butterfly, as a moth, mainly because butterfly is (I think) a goofy sounding word.” Hmmm. I think most English speakers are fine with butterfly.
Steve Schwartzman
April 6, 2024 at 8:23 PM
Well, sand is ground-up rocks, so it’s only a change in scale. And sometimes it doesn’t take much to make us nature photographers happy, either.
I remember your previous comment about the shade of green shown by young mesquite trees. Plenty of them have been looking like that around here.
Even when I visited Lake Somerville State Park two weeks ago a fair number of the bluebonnets were already forming seed pods. And who can count all the times we’ve seen something on our computer monitors that we didn’t notice at the time we took the picture.
Steve Schwartzman
April 6, 2024 at 7:05 PM
[…] March 26th we visited Gloster Bend, Turkey Bend, and Shaffer Bend, all on the north side of the Colorado River west of Austin. Two days later we spent hours on the […]
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