It wasn’t just Inks Lake State Park

 

It wasn’t just Inks Lake State Park that was spectacularly flowerful on March 26th. We found that many places along TX 29 from Liberty Hill in Williamson County all the way to the turnoff for the park also sported wildflower displays better than I’d ever seen on that stretch of highway. Here are two views from TX 29 east of the junction with Park Road 4. The red blanketflowers seems to be Gaillardia amblyodon. The brown-centered yellow flower heads are Coreopsis basalis. The white ones are lazy daisies, Aphanostephus skirrhobasis. The all-yellow flower heads appear to be sleepy daisies, Xanthisma texanum subsp. drummondii.

 

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

How gneiss

 

As you’ve seen, Inks Lake State Park was spectacularly flowerful on March 26th. One of the park’s attractions is all-seasonal: the gneiss bedrock, which has broken the surface in various places and also given rise to boulders. The wildflowers above are Coreopsis basalis, known as golden-wave, goldenmane tickseed, and just plain coreopsis.

 

 

Lichens have made many rock surfaces their homes, as you see in these three views.

 

 

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Ground zero for wildflowers west of Austin

 

If Pflugerville has been ground zero for wildflowers on the prairie east of Austin this spring, Inks Lake State Park an hour west of our home could qualify for the same title in its rocky area. So we confirmed on May 26th when we spent hours out there. Scenes like these two with wildflowers blanketing the ground were common almost everywhere we looked. In the top view, the predominant species was Helenium amarum var. badium, known as brown bitterweed for the dark disk at the center of each flower head’s yellow rays. That species appears in the second view, too, along with the somewhat larger dark-centered yellow flower heads of Coreopsis basalis, known as coreopsis, golden-wave, and goldenmane tickseed. The mostly red flower heads are firewheels, Gaillardia pulchella, which have appeared in many recent posts.

 

 

 

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Here’s another passage from Yeonmi Park’s 2023 book While Time Remains:

 

“America is a racist, imperialist, evil, greedy country that is more responsible than any other for war, injustice, cruelty, inequality, and terror around the world. We will never rest until American capitalism is overturned, the American military and police state are dissolved, and American democracy is exposed as nothing more than a corrupt sham.”

Question: If you had to bet, to whom would you attribute this quote? A North Korean television broadcaster? An Iranian government cleric? A professor at Columbia? A U.S. congressperson? My guess is you’d probably wager as little money as possible on such a bet, because it’s genuinely too hard to know! It could just as easily be an ISIS general as a junior product manager at Twitter. To someone who’s lived 50 percent of her life in each world—half in the anti-American authoritarian dictatorship, and half in the land of the free itself—this has been quite the shock. How did we get to the point where American children and North Korean children are being fed fairly similar propaganda about the United States?

The parallels are doubly shocking when you consider the kinds of people who espouse these views. In North Korea, the people you hear railing against America are underfed teachers, malnourished children, frightened parents, and elites whose livelihoods depend on the Kim crime family. That doesn’t make their hatred and ignorance excusable, but at least it makes some sense. In America, however, the people railing against their own country are often overfed, or obsessed with intentionally limiting the amount of food they eat. Often they will “speak out” against American history, society, capitalism, and democracy on an American social-media platform from their American phone or computer, or on the campus of a world-class American university, or on the street with the permission of American government authorities and the protection of American police officers. North Koreans say such things because if they don’t, they’ll be shot. Americans do it because they think it’s fun, or because they want to acquire power and influence over other people.

It’s no wonder, really, that while millions of people around the world continue to face murder, starvation, rape, torture, and enslavement, many Americans who support “social justice” are primarily concerned with the infinite multiplication of ungrammatical gender pronouns and how much “range” to give chickens before they wind up in supermarkets. It’s easy to laugh at this kind of childish, nonsensical behavior—even I enjoy poking fun at it now and again—but at the end of the day, unfortunately, it’s deadly serious. When a people become untethered from history, when they become unshackled from reality, when they lose the ability to understand cause and effect, they become ripe for exploitation from those who hold real power.

 

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Sunflowers in mid-March

 

Most of the plants we call sunflowers inhabit the genus Helianthus (which is Greek for ‘sunflower’). I say most, but not all. Here you’re looking at Simsia calva, known as the bush sunflower, a few clumps of which I found already flowering in Burnet County on March 17th. The second picture came from aiming somewhat downward to include several bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis) near the ground.

 

 

Because bush sunflower stalks tend to grow tall, I could get on the ground beneath one and take a lofty look.

 

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Look at the clouds. Look at the cliff.

 

Look at the clouds. Look at the cliff. Look at the bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis). You might hardly notice those flowers. They’re there at the bottom, making up a tiny element of the picture. They don’t always get to be the stars in their pictures. Sometimes humility’s the watchword.

I photographed this cliffscape in Burnet County on March 17th.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

A closer look at Yucca torreyi

 

At Longhorn Cavern State Park on March 17th the Lady Eve found a Yucca torreyi with particularly fresh and photogenic flowers. I carefully reached in over the “bayonets” and made some portraits.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Yucca torreyi

 

When we visited Longhorn Cavern State Park in January I made a mental note to return in the spring to check out the wildflowers on the property. That checking-out came on March 17th. As we approached along Park Road 4 we couldn’t help noticing some attractive Yucca torreyi plants in full flower, though unfortunately there weren’t safe places to pull over near them. Arriving at Longhorn Caverns, safety wasn’t the problem: finding an empty space in the unexpectedly crowded parking lots was. (Tour groups now numbered in the dozens, whereas our January tour consisted of a whopping four visitors.) I don’t think you’ll have any trouble understanding why two of the vernacular names for this yucca species are Spanish bayonet and Spanish dagger; the “Spanish” presumably goes back to the time when Mexico, including Texas, was a colony of Spain.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

More from Shaffer Bend

Last Thursday’s post was the first ever to feature pictures from the Shaffer Bend Recreation Area along the Colorado River a little east of Marble Falls in Burnet County. During our inaugural April 19th visit I got to see a few huisache daisies, Amblyolepis setigera, a species I don’t find in Austin. The most recent time I showed you some was last year, when you saw a whole colony flowering in a place close to Shaffer Bend. Above are a huisache daisy bud and open flower head; the picture below shows an intermediate stage.

 

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In a post a couple of weeks ago I mentioned that the Latin word for ‘head,’ caput, led to the English word capital. A state’s or a country’s capital is metaphorically its “head” city. In a different metaphorical usage, capital is money that we accumulate to “head up” or “head into” a new business.

As the Latin spoken in ancient Gaul evolved over hundreds and hundreds of years, caput gradually got transformed into Old French chief. (Yes, words can change that much over long periods.) The Old French noun chief retained the literal meaning ‘head’ and also allowed for figurative uses. When Middle English borrowed chief, it already had its familiar native word head for the body part, so it borrowed chief in its figurative sense of ‘most important.’ That’s why James A. Garfield could write in 1869: “The chief duty of government is to keep the peace and stand out of the sunshine of the people.” The leader of the nine justices on the Supreme Court of the United States is designated the Chief Justice; the other justices regularly refer to him simply as “the Chief.” For hundreds of years we’ve called the head of an American Indian tribe its chief. A large business has its CEO and CFO and COO, meaning its chief executive officer, chief financial officer, and chief operating officer.

With regard to managerial positions like those, the people running the San Francisco Unified Schools District have once again been up to mischief—etymologically a situation in which things have ‘come to a head [chief] in a bad [mis-] way.’ Out of supposed deference to the sensibilities of people in American Indian tribes, the bureaucrats in charge of that school district have decided to drop the chief from job titles like chief technology officer and chief of staff.

Whereas the chief responsibility of a school district has traditionally been to teach students, recent chief goals in San Francisco have included renaming schools and dictating what words people must and can’t say. The Wall Street Journal editorial “Chiefly Illiterate in San Francisco Schools” and the New York Post article “San Francisco school district drops ‘chief’ from job titles” will fill you in on the chief details of this latest ideological assault on language. Meanwhile, even before the pandemic, 27 of San Francisco’s schools were rated “low performing” and 9 were among the worst in California, which is in the bottom fifth of American states academically.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Red and green at Inks Lake State Park

One reason I headed out to Inks Lake State Park on May 6th was that some of the prickly pear cactus flowers there in other springtimes have displayed more red than I see in their Austin counterparts. The top picture shows that was true this year, too. In contrast to that red, look at all the placid green around one inlet.

  

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Did you hear about how the imaging technique of photogrammetry has revealed details of cave art in Alabama from about 2000 years ago? “The motifs, which depict human forms and animals, are some of the largest known cave images found in North America and may represent spirits of the underworld.” Check it out.

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

“Bloom” patterns at Inks Lake State Park

On May 6th we drove the roughly one hour west to Inks Lake State Park, which by coincidence we’d visited exactly one year earlier. Because of the continuing drought, the place wasn’t the coreopsis-covered wonderland we’d found there in the spring of 2019. One thing that caught my attention last week that wasn’t there when we’d last visited, in November 2021, was bright green algae in several places along the lakeline, where the algae contrasted in color with the granite that underlies the region. Shape-wise I saw similarities to the many lichens on the selfsame granite in rocks and boulders.

  

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The Bill of Rights consists of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution of the United States. Perhaps the best known of the 10 is the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It’s become common these days to hear people say that the First Amendment came first because it states the most fundamental rights of American citizens. As conveniently symbolic as that justification sounds, it’s not true. An article on Thoughtco.com explains:

Drawing on the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, and Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, mainly written by George Mason, James Madison drafted 19 amendments, which he submitted to the U.S. House of Representatives on June 8, 1789. The House approved 17 of them and sent [them] to the U.S. Senate, which approved 12 of them on September 25. Ten were ratified by the states and became law on December 15, 1791.

When the Senate’s 12 amendments were submitted to the states for ratification, the first two of them failed, so the remaining 10 that got approved all moved up two slots. What was originally the third of the 12 amendments became our First Amendment. To learn more of the details, including information about the two amendments that failed in 1789—one of which finally got approved two centuries later—you can read the full article.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman