Two more wildflower extravaganzas

 

From March 13th adjacent to the McKeller Cemetery along US 183 in Gonzales comes this floral panorama of sandyland bluebonnets (Lupinus subcarnosus), bladderpod (Lesquerella sp.), lazy daisies (Aphanostephus skirrhobasis), and phlox (Phlox drummondii). A few miles north of there I’d indulged in the classic combo of bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis) and Indian paintbrushes (Castilleja indivisa). Click to enlarge each picture.

 

 

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I’ve been reading Superabundance, a 2022 book by Marian L. Tupy and Gale Pooley. They make the point that, despite predictions of doom and gloom, the world has been improving:

Let’s start with income, for richer societies can afford more food, better healthcare, higher levels of education, and so on. Between 1950 and 2019, the average income per person in the United States rose from $15,001 to $63,233, or 322 percent. In the United Kingdom, it rose from $12,008 to $44,960, or 274 percent. Between 1952 and 2019, the population-weighted average global income per person rose from $4,063 to $18,841, or 364 percent (all figures are in 2018 U.S. dollars).

Increased prosperity was not confined to developed nations. Some of the world’s poorest countries benefited handsomely from income growth over the last few decades. The growth in Chinese incomes, from $238 in 1952 to $19,800 in 2019, amounts to a staggering 8,219 percent. India saw its average income rise from $930 to $8,148, or 776 percent. Even sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s poorest region, saw its income per person rise from $2,222 to $3,866, or 74 percent (all figures are again in 2018 U.S. dollars).

Except for a handful of war-torn African countries, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and failing socialist countries, such as Venezuela, real incomes rose throughout the world over the last half-century—often substantially.

Now, consider the population-weighted average global life expectancy, which rose from 52.6 years in 1960 to 72.4 years in 2017, or 37.6 percent. In the United States, it rose from 69.8 years to 78.5 years, or 13 percent. In the United Kingdom, it rose from 71.1 years to 81.2 years, or 14 percent.

Once again, the world’s poorest nations experienced some of the greatest life expectancy gains: China, from 43.7 years to 76.4 years, or 75 percent; India, from 41.2 years to 68.8 years, or 67 percent; and sub-Saharan Africa, from 40.4 years to 60.9 years or 51 percent. There is not a single country in the world where life expectancy was lower in 2017 than it was in 1960.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

And a shotgun

 

After we turned for home along on FM 1117 northward from Nixon on March 13th we kept seeing more gorgeous roadside wildflower displays. By then, though, we’d been out for many an hour, I’d stopped plenty of times for pictures already, and the sky had largely clouded over (as you saw in a picture yesterday). March 15th found us back there a little earlier and with better light, so this time I pulled over at a property that had caught my fancy two days before.

Walking back and forth outside the fence, I took pictures of the wildflowers. Lost in my photographing as I was, I didn’t notice that at some point two women had come out and that one carried a shotgun. Eve saw them and waved to them to show that we were friendly. Eventually one of the women called out to me but I gestured that I couldn’t hear what she was saying. She walked over to me at the fence and confirmed that all I was doing was taking pictures of the wildflowers. She said they’d had trouble with people coming on the property, so they were leery. In any case, I didn’t get blasted, and all’s well that ends well.

The yellow flowers are Texas groundsel (Senecio ampullaceus), the pink are phlox (Phlox drummondii), and the orange are Indian paintbrushes (Castilleja indivisa). Little mounds of sand like the one in the foreground are a common feature in that region.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Cloudscape

 

My last stop in our seven-hour wildflower chase on March 13th wasn’t for wildflowers. It was for these clouds I’d been eyeing for some time after we turned north from Nixon on FM 1117 and headed for home.

  

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A recent post made me aware of Harry Watrous (1857–1940), a traditional American figurative painter who didn’t like modernism. Turning from style to message, however, we find him very modern in the message he conveyed in a painting from around 1913, “The Drop Sinister—What Shall We Do with It?” The first part of the title refers to the “one drop rule” from the benighted days of American slavery and racism when white supremacists considered a person with any black ancestry at all, even as little as one drop of blood, to be black and therefore to be looked down upon and mistreated.

The painting shows three people, presumably a family: a light-skinned black man on one side, a seemingly white woman and blond-haired girl together on the other side. As Wikipedia notes:

It is said to be the first known portrait of an American interracial family. The father wears a clerical collar and holds a Christian newspaper in his hand; on the wall [between the husband on the left and the wife and daughter on the right] is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln and a quotation, “And God said, Let us make man in our own image after our likeness.”

The painting caused a stir when it was exhibited at the National Academy of Design and at the Century Club in New York. “Harry W. Watrous preaches and paints well an interesting sermon on the negro question in The Drop Sinister,” commented American Art News, which also called it “one of his best canvases.” This “study in the fruits of miscegenation…caused an extraordinary amount of discussion, residents of one typically Southern city threatening to wreck the art museum if it was shown there.”

The painting appears to depict a mixed marriage, which was illegal in many states at the time. The Crisis, the N.A.A.C.P. journal edited by W.E.B. DuBois, had a different idea about what was going on in the picture:

The people in this picture are all “colored”; that is to say the ancestors of all of them two or three generations ago numbered among them full-blooded Negroes. These “colored” folk married and brought to the world a little golden-haired child; today they pause for a moment and sit aghast when they think of this child’s future.

What is she? A Negro? No, she is “white.” But is she white? The United States Census says she is a “Negro.” What earthly difference does it make what she is, so long as she grows up a good, true, capable woman? But her chances for doing this are small! Why?

Because 90,000,000 of her neighbors, good Christian, noble, civilized people are going to insult her, seek to ruin her and slam the door of opportunity in her face the moment they discover “The Drop Sinister.”

The reference to people threatening to wreck an art museum if “The Drop Sinister” was shown there reminds us that in at least one respect nothing has changed in the century since Harry Watrous created his painting. We still have zealots who feel justified in attacking, even with physical violence, anyone who has ideas different from any of the zealots’ cherished beliefs.

The most recent criminal activity of that sort I’m aware of took place at the University of California, Davis on March 14th, when woke activists rioted to protest a speech by Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA. The rioters (and unfortunately many students on campus) believe Charlie Kirk is “hateful” in believing, for example, that biological men shouldn’t be allowed to compete against women in athletics. Ironically, the zealots have pushed beyond the one-drop rule of racial segregation and now follow a zero-drop rule: anyone born with not even a single drop of female blood can demand to be treated as a woman.

 

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Coral honeysuckle flowering

 

Coral honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) in Springfield Park on March 12th.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Wildflower panorama

 

From March 13th along US 183 south of Interstate 10 comes this floral panorama of sandyland bluebonnets (Lupinus subcarnosus), Indian paintbrushes (Castilleja indivisa), and phlox (Phlox drummondii).

 

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There’s a saying that goes at least as far back as 1742: “On ne saurait faire d’omelette sans casser des oeufs.” Attributed to François de Charette, it means “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” You’ll often find the adage attributed to Lenin or Stalin, who may have quoted it as a rationalization of the fact that to bring about the “glories” of communism there will have to be some “collateral damage,” as we’ve now taken to calling it.

I was reminded of the quotation because in reading Superabundance, a new book by Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley, I came to this passage:

Marx, as is well known, wanted to replace “exploitative” capitalism (i.e., commercial society so beloved by many “enlightened” thinkers) with classless, stateless, and moneyless communal living. Communist revolutionaries from the Soviet Union and China to Cambodia and North Korea consequently set out to create a Marxist utopia by eliminating capitalism. Communism brought about the destruction of the last vestiges of feudalism in the former Russian empire, parts of China, and some other places, but it came at the steep price of some 100 million lives.

That’s a whole lot of eggs for a few rotten omelets.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Mexican buckeye

 

I’ve been so busy with our long wildflower drives that I forgot to show these
Mexican buckeye blossoms (Ungnadia speciosa) from Great Hills Park on March 10th.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Bebe

 

I didn’t know if the people in Bebe pronounce the name of their town Beeb or Beebee. This morning I checked a Handbook of Texas article which says the name “supposedly derived from the B. B. Baking Powder signs that lined the road into the place,” so I presume the name is pronounced Beebee. In any case, there can be (or be be) no doubt that the front and back yards of the Oak Vally Baptist Church there on March 13 and 15 (yes, we returned) were covered with great wildflowers. The red ones are Phlox drummondii and the yellow ones are buttercups (Ranunculus sp.) The little white flowers are a species of Aphanostephus, probably A. skirrhobasis, known as lazy daisy.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Epiepiphyte

 

First came a tree branch. Then lichens partly surrounded the branch. Then on top of the lichens came a ball moss, Tillandsia recurvata. (If your imagination turns the ball moss into a supernumerary spider, that’s on you.) I played botanical archaeologist with the layers on March 4th on the grounds of Central City Austin, which despite its name is a church far from the center of Austin.

I seem able to get away with epiepiphyte [from Greek epi, meaning ‘upon, over, around’] in my title because there’s ambiguity in the term epiphyte. All the dictionaries I’ve checked give a definition like ‘a plant that grows on another plant but is not parasitic on it.’ The key word in such definitions is plant. Outside dictionaries, some sources use epiphyte more broadly by replacing plant with organism. For instance, the Wikipedia article on epiphytes says “Epiphytes in marine systems are species of algae, bacteria, fungi, sponges, bryozoans, ascidians, protozoa, crustaceans, molluscs and any other sessile organism that grows on the surface of a plant, typically seagrasses or algae.” While Wikipedia isn’t always to be trusted, I’m finding the more expansive sense of epiphyte in indisputably scientific sources as well. For example, the book Forest Conditions in a Changing Environment speaks of “epiphytic lichens, which grow on the branches and trunks of trees.” And so it seems I can get away with calling the ball moss in this picture an epiepiphyte.

 

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I recently came across Alan Levinovitz’s article “The info equivalent of junk food,” with subtitle “Ultra-processed information is hijacking our appetites much like ultra-processed snacks do.” Check it out.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Return to Lake Somerville State Park

 

On March 11th we returned to the Birch Creek Unit at Lake Somerville State Park for the first time since we’d visited a year earlier. In contrast to the later dramatic view in yesterday’s post, the clouds had been soft and white. The yellow flowers are Senecio ampullaceus, known as Texas groundsel or Texas ragwort. The others are bluebonnets, Lupinus texensis.

 

 

If clouds be dreams, what pleasant slumbers.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Pink evening primroses

 

Pink evening primroses (Oenothera speciosa)
south of Smithville on March 5th.
Backlighting’s benefits betide.

 

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And speaking of betide, did you know that worth used to be an English verb which meant ‘be, become, betide’? Wiktionary gives as an example: “Woe worth the man that crosses me,” meaning “May woe come to the man that crosses me.”

In another example, “Well worth thee, me friend,” a modern reader will likely think this is the unrelated worth that means ‘value’ and may misinterpret the sentence as if the friend had performed some worthy deed. In fact the actual meaning is “May good fortune befall you, my friend.”

This worth that English no longer finds worthy of retaining in its vocabulary (except in some dialects) is a cognate of the very-much-alive German verb werden. It’s also a cognate of the Latin verb vertere, which meant ‘to turn’ and by extension ‘to change,’ and which we find in borrowed words like convert, revert and vertex.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman