Interstate 35
On April 29th, after I documented great wildflowers in the median of the Capital of Texas Highway that borders my Great Hills neighborhood, we headed out after lunch toward Georgetown, about 20 miles north of Austin. The main highway through there is Interstate 35, whose margins and embankments in some sections did justice to Texas’s wildflower season. One such place was the southwest quadrant of the intersection with Leander Rd., where Engelmann daisies (Engelmannia perestenia) punctuated a dense colony of firewheels (Gaillardia pulchella). In the same quadrant a Texas thistle (Cirsium texanum) towered over the firewheels; that picture gives you a better feel for how large and dense the firewheel colony was.
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Rep. John McDowell: … Don’t [Russians] do things at all like Americans? Don’t they walk across town to visit their mother-in-law or somebody?
Ayn Rand: Look, it is very hard to explain. It is almost impossible to convey to a free people what it is like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship. I can tell you a lot of details. I can never completely convince you, because you are free. It is in a way good that you can’t even conceive of what it is like. Certainly they have friends and mothers-in-law. They try to live a human life, but you understand it is totally inhuman. Try to imagine what it is like if you are in constant terror from morning till night and at night you are waiting for the doorbell to ring, where you are afraid of anything and everybody, living in a country where human life is nothing, less than nothing, and you know it. You don’t know who or when is going to do what to you because you may have friends who spy on you, where there is no law and any rights of any kind.…
That’s from a 1947 hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives. Just like my father, Ayn Rand grew up under the tyranny of the Soviet Union and managed to escape and come to the United States in the mid-1920s. Tomorrow we’ll jump ahead a century from their arrival.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Portraits of Wildflowers 
Thank you, Steve, for the beautiful wildflowers meadow, and interesting details due tomorrow, of your father’s escape from Russia!
Joanna
gabychops
May 16, 2024 at 5:40 AM
You’ll be interested to read my father’s own reminiscences about that.
Steve Schwartzman
May 16, 2024 at 8:06 PM
Yes, I will read it! Thank you!
Joanna
gabychops
May 17, 2024 at 1:52 AM
We just don’t get this sort of display in New Jersey. I don’t think we have enough open spaces. Our meadows are tiny. This is beautiful.
Khürt Williams
May 16, 2024 at 6:31 AM
Similarly, I grew up on Long Island and never saw fabulous wildflower displays like this there. I don’t know if open space per se is the determining factor, because plenty of highways in New Jersey have embankments as large as the one in this post’s photographs.
Steve Schwartzman
May 16, 2024 at 8:11 PM
Travel’s not only good for the soul, it’s obviously good for wildflower spotting. The second photo’s an unusual combination of the purple and gold I enjoy, and like the individual Mexican hat in your previous post, seeing this one standing alone is fun. It’s the floral version of the lone oak in a meadow.
shoreacres
May 16, 2024 at 8:02 AM
Travel’s also good for seeing landscapes. Three days ago I found them at Monahans Sandhills; two days ago at Palo Duro Canyon; yesterday at Caprock Canyons. I did do some botanical pictures in all three places but they constituted only a small portion of my “take.”
Steve Schwartzman
May 16, 2024 at 8:20 PM
Ha! Your obvious change in routine left me pondering the options: illness, accident in the field, boredom, or travel. I’m glad it was travel, and I’m looking forward to seeing the photographic results.
shoreacres
May 16, 2024 at 8:21 PM
Got back from the mini-trip yesterday evening, a day earlier than planned, after a couple of things in Abilene didn’t pan out (though the Gage Museum there and the restaurant next-door proved quite good). Now I’ve got to deal with some 1500 pictures.
Steve Schwartzman
May 18, 2024 at 8:39 AM
I like the word ‘meadow’ for these landscapes also. I read there are several types of meadows, so when you mentioned that some of these lots may be cleared for development, the meadow is also called ‘transitional meadows’, but there are also ‘agricultural’, ones, etc. The ‘transitional’ word is painful! Beautiful shot!
Maria
May 16, 2024 at 8:58 AM
The land shown here borders a busy interstate highway. At first hearing that doesn’t sound like it favors nature; on second thought, though, the land will remain land and won’t be built on. The only way I can think of that the land will become transitional is if the highway someday gets extra lanes added. As this stretch of highway has already gotten expanded from two lanes to three in each direction, any further widening would likely be way in the future.
Steve Schwartzman
May 18, 2024 at 11:35 AM
The second photo is amazing – such an expanse of firewheels! And the thistle is a fine tall one!
Ann Mackay
May 16, 2024 at 1:05 PM
In the second picture I included as many firewheels as possible without showing any trace of the adjacent highway or other human traces. Texas thistles can grow to 2m tall. The one shown here wasn’t that tall but it certainly towered over the firewheels.
Steve Schwartzman
May 18, 2024 at 12:24 PM
More kudos for the highway planners and, I reckon, Mrs. Johnson.
Leave it to a thistle to be outstanding in its field. As you point out, that second image certainly gives a good idea of how vast that wonderful floral display really is.
Wally Jones
May 16, 2024 at 2:25 PM
At least the state-contracted mowers didn’t mow down these wildflowers in their prime, as I’ve seen happen a bunch of times over the years. I wish Mrs. Johnson were still around so she could use whatever influence she still had to get the contracts that the state gives mowers to include a provision that forbids mowing till after the wildflowers have produced seeds.
I’ll borrow your words about the thistle and strive to be outstanding in my field (which is as much a verbal as a floral one).
Steve Schwartzman
May 18, 2024 at 12:31 PM
Many years ago, the Florida highway folks emulated the Texas model and seeded some interstate medians around the state capitol, Tallahassee. Some smarter-than-the-average-bear planner placed signs during spring admonishing “DO NOT MOW THE WILDFLOWERS!”. Even now, those areas shine brightly with the state flower (genus), Coreopsis.
Wally Jones
May 19, 2024 at 8:16 AM
Here, too, I’ve occasionally seen signs saying “Wildflower area: do not mow.” To what extent mowers have heeded the signs, I don’t know.
Steve Schwartzman
May 19, 2024 at 8:46 AM