Winterspring

 

I went down to Great Hills Park on February 21st for two main reasons: to check out the damage the ice storm had done three weeks earlier, and to see whether tokens of spring had appeared in the recent warm days. Just as at our house half a mile away, the weight of ice had felled many tree limbs and even entire trees, particularly Ashe junipers, in the park. I almost didn’t recognize a few places, so heavy was the damage.

At the same time, the sub-freezing temperatures had quickly given way to mostly warm days, with temperatures on a few of them even climbing above 80°F. The calendar notwithstanding, this was already botanical spring. One sign of it that I sought out was an elbowbush I know, Forestiera pubescens, a reliably early blossomer in Austin. If anything, I proved to be on the late side, with the bush’s flowers already a little past their prime. And speaking of blossoms, if someone asked you to think of a typical flower, you’d very likely imagine one with petals. Don’t all flowers have petals? Actually not, as the elbowbush proves.

Sometimes a plant has more of something than you expect: I just learned from the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center website that other vernacular names for this species are stretchberry, spring herald, desert olive, tanglewood, devil’s elbow, spring goldenglow, New Mexico privet, and Texas forsythia. Elbowbush is the only name I’ve ever heard anyone in Austin use.

Even if the elbowbush in Great Hills Park had passed its flowering prime, I was still happy to find it doing its thing. So was a juniper hairstreak butterfly, Callophrys gryneus.

 

 

 

 

✦

✦        ✦        ✦

✦

 

The other day I came across a collection of essays by Theodore Dalrymple called Our Culture, What’s Left of It. I found it not in a bookstore or on the website of an online bookseller but in my living room. When and where I bought the book, and how I’d first heard about it, I can’t recall. Sic transit memoria mundi. Call me a literary squirrel, stashing away written acorns to be dug up and devoured in another season.

In any case, I randomly read several of the essays, and I quickly learned that the guy knows how to write and to think. Here are a few quotations:

From an essay comparing the art of Mary Cassatt (favorably) to the late works of Joan Miró (unfavorably): “In the history of art, unlike that of science, what comes after is not necessarily better than what came before.”

From the essay “How to Read a Society,” written in 2000, which includes a discussion of the long history of despotism in Russia, first under the tsars and then under communism: “If it was difficult for a visitor to find anything to eat impromptu in Moscow, Havana, Tirana, Bucharest, or Pyongyang, it took little effort to understand the connection of this difficulty with the vulgar anti-commercialism of Saint Karl [Marx] and Saint Vladimir [Lenin]. Indeed, it would have taken all the ingenuity of the cleverest academics not to have understood it.”

In the next paragraph, discussing the Marquis de Custine, who visited Russia in 1839: “Writing before the development of modern ‘scientific’  sociology, whose achievement has been to obscure by means of statistical legerdemain the importance of human consciousness, Custine analyzed Russian society by reference to the psychology of the individuals who made it up. His work is a supreme example of the subtle interplay between the abstract information about a political system and the imaginative entry into the worldview of the people who live in it that is necessary for the understanding of any society.”

Writing about how Custine as a boy had lived through the excesses of the French Revolution: “No doubt Custine’s family history and upbringing had heightened his acuity. His grandfather was a liberal aristocrat who became a general in the revolutionary army, but whom the Jacobins guillotined as not sufficiently devoted to the cause. Custine’s father went to the guillotine for having tried to defend him. Custine’s mother, imprisoned as an enemy of the people for having tried to defend her husband, narrowly escaped execution herself, largely because one of the revolutionary fanatics who arrested her fell in love with her. Astolphe de Custine was brought up for a time by a faithful servant, living in penury with her in the only room of the Custine home that had not been looted and sealed off by Jacobin zealots and thieves. Such a background was likely to produce a man aware of the deep subterranean currents in life and not easily deceived by appearances. The evils of envy and hatred masquerading as humanitarian idealism had darkened his life from its outset, stamping him as a man quick to search for the reality behind the expression of fine sentiments.”

Look at that 20-year foreshadowing of what’s taking hold today: “the evils of envy and hatred masquerading as humanitarian idealism.” Dalrymple goes on to compare Custine’s writings about Russia to those of his contemporary confrère Alexis de Tocqueville about America. I see that Dalrymple’s whole essay is available online, so you’re welcome to read it. In fact many more of his essays are available on the City Journal website. Probably that’s how I first heard about him.

 

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

 

December bluebonnet

 

It’s quite a stretch for a bluebonnet (Lupinus texensis) to be flowering now, but that’s what I found this one doing on December 9th at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. The normal bloom period is March–May.

More to be expected at this time of year was a queen butterfly, Danaus gilippus, on Gregg’s mistflower, Conoclinium greggii. With an angled portrait like this one you can’t expect to get a subject, especially a frequently moving one, sharp throughout. I aimed for the head, knowing the farther parts would be out of focus. Some motion blur back there actually appeals to me.

  

  

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Fall colors at Pecos National Historic Park

 

On October 19th we spent time at Pecos National Historical Park in north-central New Mexico. While most people visit the place for insights into the ways the Spaniards and native people interacted, as a photographer I still found things in nature to photograph—even if my task was made harder by a prohibition against wandering off the trails because this was a historic site with artifacts yet to be unearthed and restored.

 

 

The top picture shows how I looked down from a high place at trees turning bright yellow. At first I assumed the group at the right was cottonwoods (Populus deltoides subsp. wislizenii) but now the white bark makes me wonder if they were aspens (Populus tremuloides). The second photograph is one I could have taken at home because fragrant sumac (Rhus trilobata) grows in Austin. Below, chamisa, also called rubber rabbitbrush (Ericameria nauseosa) was flowering, sometimes exuberantly.

 

 

One group of those plants attracted lots of butterflies, including a painted lady, Vanessa cardui, which I also could have photographed back in Austin (though not on chamisa). The smaller butterfly looks like it might have been a checkered skipper, Pyrgis communis, which also frequents central Texas.

 

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Light and shadow, and light

Central Texas is home to several species of Sesbania, including the Sesbania vesicaria that botanists have now reclassified as Glottidium vesicarium, known as bladderpod sesbania or bagpod sesbania for the shape of its pods. In Bastrop State Park on September 23rd I played with the light and shadows on some of the many pods in evidence there that morning. I also took advantage of bright sunlight to portray a gray hairstreak butterfly (Strymon melinus) on the flowers of what I take to be tall bush clover (Lespedeza stuevei), a species I’d never photographed before and that is therefore making its debut here today.

↑
←    ⦿    →
↓

Here’s more from Xi Van Fleet, a woman who escaped from the depredations of Mao’s [Anti-]Cultural Revolution and who sees worrisome parallels in the increasing repression and censorship in the United States. (I have a personal connection to such stories because my father and his parents and brother managed to escape from the terror of the Soviet Union in the 1920s.)

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

White-striped longtail

It wasn’t only bumblebees I saw on the flower spikes of gayfeather (Liatris punctata var. mucronata) at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center on September 11th. No indeed. Among other visitors was this white-striped longtail butterfly (Chioides catillus).

❀
❀       ❀
❀       ❀       ❀
❀       ❀
❀

In unrelated sources over the span of just one hour the other day I came across two similar quotations:

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” — Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, 1947.

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and all we had to do is separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. — Alexander Sozhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1975.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Queen butterfly on Gregg’s mistflower

On August 20th we drove 60 miles north to the town of Lampasas. In the Hanna Springs Sculpture Garden there we couldn’t help noticing that a bunch of Gregg’s mistflowers (Conoclinium greggii) had attracted a slew of insects, especially queen butterflies (Danaus gilippus). I got to photograph this one while it was “underlit.”

The orange flowers at the far right are Texas lantana (Lantana urticoides). They were as plentiful as the mistflowers but the butterflies ignored the lantana and couldn’t seem to get enough of the mistflowers. For a better view of those lepidopteran-magnet flowers, you’re welcome to look back at a butterfly post from 2017.

◊
◊         ◊
◊

People have always known that there are two biological sexes: male and female. 20th-century geneticists discovered the mechanism that sustains the male-female distinction: DNA. I follow the science. A self-described “Blewish feminist mermaid”—and that tells you a lot right there—has delusionally rejected the science.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Tawny emperor

On July 23rd I noticed what I take to be a tawny emperor, Asterocampa clyton, on an aluminum railing near the entrance to Great Hills Park. I’d been doing botanical closeups in the park and still had a ring flash at the end of my macro lens, so I was able to get good depth of field in the pictures I took of the butterfly.

The other day I used the second picture to play around with some of the effects in Topaz Studio 2, which I downloaded a 30-day free trial of. Click the thumbnail below if you’d like to see the result of applying “Brilliant on White.”

◊
◊     ◊
◊

When I got home from taking pictures that morning, Eve was watching a television program in which the host was interviewing two women who had opposite political perspectives. I walked in just at the moment when the woman representing the Democratic Party claimed that a bill that had passed the Texas Senate, S.B. 3, would prevent teachers in Texas public schools from teaching about the Ku Klux Klan. I’d heard that false claim before. The reason I knew it was false, aside from the blatant implausibility that Texas schools would suddenly forbid the teaching of important episodes in American history that they’d already been teaching for decades, was that the first time I heard the claim I did what I normally do: I looked for evidence to support or refute it. In this case, the obvious source to check was S.B. 3. You’re welcome to read it for yourself, and if you see a clause that would forbid teaching about the Ku Klux Klan, please point it out to us.

You may recall that in a post last week I mentioned a television interview program decades ago that made a big impression on me because a guest persisted in repeating a claim about a federal bill even after the moderator had read viewers the relevant section of the bill that proved the activist’s claim false. In the July 23rd interview I wished the host had asked the activist making the claim to cite the provision in S.B. 3 that would prove her assertion.

I intended to include a link to information about the Ku Klux Klan for any readers from outside the United States who might not know about that terrorist organization (which ironically was founded and sustained over the course of a century by members and supporters of the Democratic Party). I thought the article in the Encyclopedia Britannica might serve, and then I noticed a mistake:

The 19th-century Klan was originally organized as a social club by Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866. They apparently derived the name from the Greek word kyklos, from which comes the English “circle”; “Klan” was added for the sake of alliteration and Ku Klux Klan emerged.

Actually Greek kyklos has given English the word cycle. Our similar-sounding word circle comes from a diminutive of Latin circus, which the Romans had borrowed from the etymologically unrelated Greek noun kirkos. Several days ago I sent an e-mail to the Encyclopedia Britannica pointing out the mistake. So far I haven’t gotten a reply and the mistake is still there.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Red admiral on basket-flower

From May 7th on the Blackland Prairie in southern Round Rock, here’s a red admiral butterfly (Vanessa atalanta) on a basket-flower (Plectocephalus americanus). According to a Wikipedia article, Johan Christian Fabricius gave the name Vanessa to this genus of butterflies in 1807. The name itself has an interesting origin: “It was invented by the Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift for Esther Vanhomrigh, whom Swift had met in 1708 and whom he tutored. The name was created by taking ‘Van’ from Vanhomrigh’s last name and adding ‘Essa’, a pet form of Esther.” Speaking of the author best known for writing Gulliver’s Travels, I’ll add that the English adjective swift meant ‘moving quickly’ before it got applied to and became the name of a bird that moves quickly. And because I moved so quickly from nature to words, let me come back to our basket-flower and point out that the genus name Plectocephalus (which recently got changed from Centaurea) is made up of Greek elements meaning ‘plait’ and ‘head,’ because the flower heads of this species remind people of little woven baskets.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Radial arrangements

It occurred to me that two of the plants I photographed on April 11th in Round Rock display radial arrangements. The picture above shows the top of a lace cactus, Echinocereus reichenbachii. In the other view the radial (and always five-fold) arrangement characterizes the flowers of the most common milkweed in my area, Asclepias asperula, called antelope horns. You also get to see a butterfly that I take to be Callophrys gryneus, known as the olive or juniper hairstreak, though this individual didn’t show much green.

Speaking of radial arrangements, the word that that adjective comes from is Latin radius, which originally meant ‘a staff, a rod.’ The Romans later put the word to work metaphorically to designate ‘a beam or ray of any shining object.’ In a less radiant way, geometers came to use the word abstractly for ‘any line segment connecting a circle’s center to the circle itself.’ We also find that notion of ‘going out from a central point’ in Old-French-derived ray and the Latin-based verb radiate. And then there’s rayon, which appears to have been borrowed unchanged (except for pronunciation) from the modern French word for ‘ray’; the connection is that rayon has a somewhat radiant surface.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Great purple hairstreak butterfly and Mexican plum blossoms

On March 15th at McKinney Falls State Park many flying insects were drawn to the heady blossoms of a Mexican plum tree (Prunus mexicana). Among those insects was a great purple hairstreak butterfly (Atlides halesus). You can see that despite its common name, it doesn’t look purple. You can also see in the second picture the dense multitude of blossoms that adorned the tree.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman