Non-linear mealy blue sage

The stalks of mealy blue sage (Salvia farinacea) are known to depart from straight lines.

These pictures from August 25th at the intersection of Mopac and US 183 confirm that.

The stalk in the third picture loops us around into a quaint little article called “Dangerous Amusement” that appeared in The Philadelphia Medical Journal on August 10, 1901:

“Loop-the-Loop” is the name of a new entertainment which goes further in the way of tempting Providence than anything yet invented. The “Loop” is an immense circle of track in the air. A car on a mimic railway shoots down a very steep incline, and is impelled around the inner side of this loop. Part of this journey, of course, is made “heads down,” the people in the car retaining their places by the great centrifugal force. The authorities at Coney Island are said to have prohibited “looping-the-loop” because women break their corset strings in their efforts to catch their breath as they sweep down the incline, and moreover, a young man is reported to have ruptured a blood vessel in his liver. We predict other accidents from this contrivance yet. No person with a weak heart or bad arteries should try it.

Loop the Loop opened in 1901 and was discontinued in 1910.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

Anemone seed head coming apart in front of a mealy blue sage flower spike

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Remember the flowers of Anemone decapetala that you saw here in January and March? Now you get to look at a later stage in which a seed core has loosened up and is beginning to disperse its seeds (or disburse them if you’d like to think they’re the wealth of the species). And how about those fine hairs attached to the seeds?

Paralleling the anemone in the background is a flower spike of mealy blue sage, Salvia farinacea.

This photograph is from April 3 along E. University Blvd. in Georgetown, as was yesterday’s picture of a wild onion bud.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

Mealy blue sage and truly blue sky

From the same June 13th session along Great Northern Blvd. that produced the recently shown bush sunflower pictures comes this photograph of mealy blue sage flowers, Salvia farinacea. The last Salvia you saw in these pages was the bright red cedar sage.

© 2014 Steven Schwartzman

Mealy blue sage and friends

When I went walking in the northeast quadrant of US 183 and Mopac on October 17th, in addition to a colorful greenbrier leaf and some new greenbrier growth I found a resurgence of many kinds of wildflowers. One was mealy blue sage, Salvia farinacea, which makes its primary appearance in the spring but comes up again to a lesser degree in the fall, as you see here. Note the detached but still clinging flower and the bits of spiderweb. The pink in the background is from our seemingly ubiquitous purple bindweed, Ipomoea cordatitriloba.

Even now, a month later to the day, I’m still finding occasional mealy blue sage flowers in Austin. And even now, year after year after year, I’m repeating that mealy blue sage flowers are more purple than blue.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman

Mealy blue sage and a different floral companion

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Let’s get even closer to some mealy blue sage, Salvia farinacea, so you can see the flowers’ structure. I recorded this view a day later than and a few miles north of the cloud-compassed one you saw yesterday. Note the buds at the top of the stalk that are just about to open. I won’t point out yet again that various flowers with blue in their name aren’t blue.*

In contrast to what you saw in different shades of red in this morning’s photograph, the wildflowers behind the sage shown here are Gaillardia pulchella, known as firewheels and Indian blankets, which still had a widespread presence around Austin on June 1 when I made this picture. Some of them continue flowering even now, though many have shed their flowers and turned to globes.

For those of you who are interested in photography as a craft, points 1, 2, 5 and 18 in About My Techniques are relevant to this photograph.

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* This is an old rhetorical device: you say that you won’t say a certain thing, and in saying that you won’t say it you do say it. Language can be as much fun to play with as flowers, and words are always in season.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman

Mealy blue sage and a floral entourage

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Yesterday you saw a mealy blue sage colony I recently took a picture of in Austin. I’d forgotten that on March 31, during a nearly 300-mile wildflower circuit south of Austin, I photographed an early mealy blue sage growing in a colony of standing winecups in the town of Goliad, as you see here. Botanists call the sage Salvia farinacea and the winecups Callirhoe pedata. Winecups are mallows, but if you see a resemblance to certain poppies, you’re not alone: a couple of other vernacular names for this species include the term poppy-mallow.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman

Mealy blue sage and cloud

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About two hours before I took the last post’s picture, with its ominous sky that somehow failed to produce more than a minute of almost imperceptible drizzle, I saw the tamer sky and soft cloud shown in this post’s photograph. The wildflowers are Salvia farinacea, known as mealy blue sage, and on May 31 there were plenty of them on a portion of the Texas Department of Transportation property in north-central Austin. The view from the street of another part of the property had brought me there that morning to photograph a later stage of the large colony of firewheels you saw in the post of May 11, but this time I also wandered a lot farther back and saw (and happily smelled) all the sages.

To avoid including distracting things in the background, I knelt, hunched over so that my head was near the ground, and did my best to aim upward and frame the picture even though I was straining to see clearly through the camera’s viewfinder.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman

Deminimalizing the sage

On one of the mealy blue sages, Salvia farinacea, at the Mueller Greenway on March 29th I found this butterfly. From what I can tell, it’s a white-striped longtail, Chioides catillus, faded, still bearing its white stripes but no longer its long tails, which apparently got worn away or chomped off. Such are the hazards of being a butterfly.

The focus here was on the butterfly, but you can have a better look at the flowers of this kind of sage by checking out some pictures from past posts.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

A bending sage stalk and a resident upon it

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As is true of all plants in the mint family, the stalks of Salvia farinacea are square in cross-section. They also often have a propensity to bend first one way and then the other. On June 1, when I took the picture of mealy blue sage flowers that you saw last time, I noticed one such sinuous sage stalk and decided to photograph it. That it was drying out I could tell from afar, but only when I got close did I see spiderwebs and then the tiny spider that had spun them. I think you’ll agree that this predator is well camouflaged against the pale gray of the sage stalk.

The spider takes up only a minuscule portion of the photograph and is therefore hard to see, but if you click the thumbnail below you can get a better view excerpted from a closer picture that I took during the same photo session.

Joe Lapp informs me that this type of spider is called a mesh web weaver and that it’s in the genus Dictyna within the family Dictynidae. Thanks to Joe, I’ve been able to say more than “Look at the little spider.”

As for the plant, if you focus on the surface texture of the stalk shown here, you can probably understand the mealy in mealy blue sage.

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Posted on this date last year: a gorgeous colony of wild sunflowers.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman

A blue that isn’t blue, violet that isn’t a violet, and a sage that is wise only in the ways of nature

Say hello to Salvia farinacea, called mealy blue sage, even though it’s not blue but violet. (If these flowers were blue, then what color would the sky behind them be? And of the many flowers that are this hue, how did the violet get to impose its name on the color of all of them?)

Add this to the native species you’ve seen here recently that have bloomed well before their customary time, which in the case of mealy blue sage is April and May. I photographed this one on February 19 at the Mueller Greenway in east-central Austin.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman