And now for a different slant on Maximilian sunflowers

When I was taking pictures on October 1 at the intersection of Greenlawn Blvd. and Interstate 35 in Round Rock just north of the border with Austin, I not only photographed a gulf fritillary butterfly on Maximilian sunflowers, Helianthus maximiliani, but the plants in their own right. Here I caught a cross-section of a stand of those normally erect sunflowers at the leftmost position to which a gust of wind blew them.

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman

Looking up to a Maximilian sunflower

On September 20th I went back to Blunn Creek Preserve, the scene of yesterday’s earlier photograph of snow-on-the-prairie, and found some Maximilian sunflowers, Helianthus maximiliani, doing their thing. Here’s a flower head of one of them.

If you’re interested in photography as a craft, points 1, 3, and 24 in About My Techniques pertain to this image.

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman

First Maximilian sunflowers of the season

Since July I’d been seeing occasional Maximilian sunflower plants, Helianthus maximiliani, but September 5th was the first time this year that I noticed any flowering. The location of this floral epiphany was the land around one of the ponds near the Costco in Cedar Park.

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman

Sachem on Maximilian sunflower

From August 28th on the grounds of the Elisabet Ney Museum here’s the head of a Maximilian sunflower, Helianthus maximiliani, and on it what I take to be the smallish skipper known as a sachem, Atalopedes campestris.

© 2014 Steven Schwartzman

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I’m out of town for a while. Of course you’re welcome to leave comments, but please understand if it takes me longer than usual to respond.

 

How do Maximilian sunflowers differ from common sunflowers?

Yesterday’s picture of a Maximilian sunflower, Helianthus maximiliani, at the Elisabet Ney Museum on August 28th might have made you think the plant could just as well have been a common sunflower, Helianthus annuus. One difference, as you see here, is all the long, slender, and oh-so-gradually tapering bracts beneath the head of a Maximilian sunflower. In contrast, the common sunflower has wide, relatively flat bracts that suddenly narrow only near their tips, something you can confirm in a picture posted here last year.

The background in today’s picture looks dark because I set the camera’s aperture to be small enough (f/14, for good depth of field) and the shutter speed to be fast enough (1/400 sec., to stop movement) that even the clear blue sky wasn’t bright enough to register well on the camera’s sensor with those settings. The same would have been true for the sunflower but I illuminated it with a flash, which of course had no effect on the sky.

© 2014 Steven Schwartzman

First Maximilian sunflowers for 2014

When I visited the prairie restoration at the Elisabet Ney Museum on the morning of August 28th, I saw my first Maximilian sunflowers, Helianthus maximiliani, flowering this year. Compare the asymmetrically developed head of this Maximilian sunflower to the one on a roughstem rosinweed that appeared here not long ago.

If you’re interested in photography as a craft, you’ll find that points 1, 2, 4, 7 and 18 in About My Techniques are relevant to this photograph.

© 2014 Steven Schwartzman

Still Maximilians

By late November this year, as in most years, the Maximilian sunflowers in central Texas had largely faded, but on my November 20th reconnoitering of the Blackland Praire in northeast Austin I found some attractive groups that were still flowering on the north side of Howard Ln. Here’s a closeup of two fully open flower heads and several buds below them that weren’t far behind.

When I was at the scene I saw the world in the usual way, with the full gamut of colors, but in looking at this photograph afterwords I noticed that it has just three: yellow, green, and brown.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman

Maximilian sunflowers per se

And here’s a closer look at some of the Maximilian sunflowers, Helianthus maximiliani, that I found on October 3 at an undeveloped property on E. 51st St. at Overbrook Dr. in Austin. Cheery things, aren’t they?

For more information about Maximilian sunflowers you can visit the website of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, and to see a state-clickable map of the many places where this species grows in the United States (and Canada) you can visit the USDA website.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman

Maximilian sunflower colony

Maximilian sunflowers; click for greater detail.

Remember the early Maximilian sunflowers, Helianthus maximiliani, that appeared in this column on September 12 and September 13? By now many more of them have come up and flowered, including this colony at the edge of a sump on the Blackland Prairie in northeastern Austin. “Regular” sunflowers, Helianthus annuus, don’t stand slender and erect and form a row like this.

For those interested in photography as a craft, point 3 in About My Techniques is relevant to today’s picture.

© 2011 Steven Schwartzman

An asymmetric Maximilian sunflower

Click for greater detail.

 

The last post showed you the top part of a flowering Maximilian sunflower plant, Helianthus maximiliani, looked at sideways and from slightly below. Today’s view lets you see one of this species’ opening flower heads, though a strangely asymmetric one it is: maturation has taken place unevenly, with the left side getting well ahead of the right. If you look closely at the right side, you’ll see part of a dark beetle that has burrowed into the crease between the disk flowers, still closed, and the yellow ray flowers that are opening. There’s an even smaller insect below the lowest of all the unopened disk flowers.

Like yesterday’s photograph, I took this one on September 7 at the prairie restoration on the south side of Austin’s former Mueller Airport. And as I said last time, because of the continuing drought, skies in most of the recent photographs in this blog have been a very bright blue. If the sky in today’s picture seems more pallid, it’s not an illusion. No, there was a haze in the sky on September 7, and unfortunately it was due to drifting smoke from the wildfire that continued to burn large expanses of the forest (and over 1400 houses!) in Bastrop County, some 30 miles east of Austin.

© 2011 Steven Schwartzman