Dry sunflower with sinuous stalk

This latest entry in the give-dry-plants-their-due series* shows a sunflower, Helianthus annuus, at the Riata Trace Pond in northwest Austin on July 30. It was the undulating stalk that drew my attention because I don’t know if I’d ever seen that feature in sunflowers themselves the way I have in some other members of the sunflower family.

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* The give-dry-plants-their-due series, admittedly intermittent, shows no signs of drying up. In fact tomorrow’s post will feature a whole colony of dry plants, and individual ones will play minor roles in the two posts after that. Desiccated plants needn’t be a dry subject at all.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

A simple twist of fate

You’ve seen plenty of pictures here this year of Gaillardia pulchella, known as firewheel or Indian blanket, but not till now have I showed you one this far gone and dried out, nor with so curiously looping a stalk. I took this photograph beneath cloudy skies and with rising wind on Old Settlers Blvd. near Greenhill Dr. in Round Rock on July 14th (vive la France et vive la gaillarde).

I try to give dried-out plants their due, as you’ve seen two days in a row. Tomorrow’s picture will include another one, but only as a minor element in the service of something quite different. Lovers of bright red, stay tuned.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

Gumweed gone to seed and drying out

Yesterday you saw a flower head of gumweed (Grindelia sp.). Now here’s what one looks like after it has gone to seed and begun to dry out. I originally assumed that the conspicuous object at the upper left is a seed from this plant, but it seems so large and incongruous, and I’ve often enough seen a seed from one kind of plant get stuck on another, that now I don’t know. If any native plant people can help out here, please do.

Like the last photograph, today’s comes from an extant parcel of the Blackland Prairie along Old Settlers Blvd. at Greenhill Dr. in Round Rock on July 14th.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman