Maximilian sunflower seed heads

  

The northeast quadrant at the intersection of Mopac and US 183 includes some wetland and is therefore presumably and thankfully immune to development. I wander over that terrain several times a year and always come away with pictures, often many of them. During my most recent foray there on December 14th I noticed typical ribbony fasciation in one “arm,” and only one, of a Maximilian sunflower plant (Helianthus maximiliani) whose seed heads had dried out. (Click the “fasciation” tag at the end of this post to scroll through other examples of fasciation and learn about the phenomenon if you’re not familiar with it.)

That was the second time recently that I’d photographed dried-out Maximilian sunflower seed heads.
The first had come five days earlier at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center:

 

 

And as a reminder of what one of these erect spikes would have looked like
not long before, here’s a picture from Liberty Hill on October 22nd:

 

   

 

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Parable in the form of a dialogue between an American and the American’s friend

 

The American: “A gust of wind blew the door to my house open. Now whenever the people on either side of me mow their lawn or use a leaf blower I have to put on noise-canceling headphones to keep the racket from distracting me. Some of the grass and leaves the neighbors stir up gets inside my house, so I do more sweeping and vacuuming than I used to. Every time it rains some of the rain gets in. I put down towels to absorb it and then mop up afterwards, but the water caused the wooden floor inside the doorway to warp and I had to get it replaced at great expense. Every few days a neighbor’s cat wanders inside. It’s a friendly cat but I do have to shoo it out. Once a bird flew in and was much harder to rescue. There’s a period in the spring when mosquitos are especially bad and we get a lot of bites. I’m spending so much more on electricity to heat my house in the winter and cool it in the summer that I had to take a second job to pay for it.” 

The American’s friend: “Why don’t you just close your door?”

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

  

 

 

 

 

Wildflowers at White Sands National Park

 

My photographic attention in New Mexico went mostly to scenic geological features that I can’t find in central Texas. At White Sands National Park on October 11th that meant primarily the dunes, but I did photograph a few wildflowers there as well. Right outside the visitor center was a densely flowering bush that might have been a species of Chrysothamnus. I saw several aster plants flowering, including a fasciated one:

 

 

And there were some evening-primroses, Oenothera sp.

 

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

Slenderpod sesbania

 

I made this more-is-more portrait of drying-out Sesbania herbacea plants in the northeast quadrant of Mopac and US 183 on November 1st. Because this species grows in many places, it has accumulated a bunch of common names: slenderpod sesbania, hemp sesbania, coffee-bean, danglepod, coffeeweed, Colorado River-hemp, and peatree sesbania. The photograph confirms that the first of those names is accurate; the pods really are slender, measuring 10–20 cm in length but only 3–4 mm in width.

One of the plants was conspicuously fasciated, as you see in the second picture.
You might also say it was having a bad-hair day.

 

And here’s an unrelated thought for today (with the original spelling and capitalization): “we have spent the prime of our lives in procuring them the precious blessing of liberty. let them spend theirs in shewing that it is the great parent of science & of virtue; and that a nation will be great in both always in proportion as it is free.” — Thomas Jefferson, letter to Joseph Willard, 1789.

 

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

Cacti at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

Four years ago today we spent time at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson. Above is a mature teddy bear cholla cactus, Cylindropuntia bigelovii; the second picture gives you a closer look at a younger one.

To top things off, below is a fasciated saguaro, Carnegiea gigantea.
You might say those cacti do everything in a big way.

And here’s a relevant quotation for today: “Take the rose—most people think it very beautiful: I don’t care for it at all. I prefer the cactus, for the simple reason that it has a more interesting personality. It has wonderfully adapted itself to its surroundings! It is the best illustration of the theory of evolution in plant life.” — Charles Proteus Steinmetz.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

Flourishing fasciation

The heavily fasciated tall gayfeather (Liatris aspera) that we saw in Bastrop was only budding on August 23rd, so back we went on September 6th to find out what the flowers would look like once they emerged on this distorted plant. Even after two more weeks of development, the flowers were just barely beginning to come out, so I figured we might have to wait a week or two longer and make the 95-mile round trip yet again. Fortunately, as we began heading home we spotted another fasciated specimen about a mile away, and it was fully flowering. In the picture above, the flower stalk in the distance lets you compare a normal specimen to the fasciated one in the foreground. The picture below gives you a closer look at the heart of the strangeness.

For more information about fasciation, you can read this article or this other one. The phenomenon could even serve as a reminder of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s iconoclastic statement in “Self-Reliance“:

“Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.”

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

Carstopper

While driving on Park Road 1C in Bastrop County on August 23rd I spied a plant standing right at the edge of the pavement that was so unusual it made me pull over as soon as I could. It turned out to be the same Liatris aspera, known as tall gayfeather and tall blazing-star, that you recently saw here (do have a look back at the second picture in that post for comparison), but fasciation had greatly distorted the upper part of this budding specimen. The closer view below, which shows the plant rotated about 90° from its orientation when I took the first picture, reveals details of the super-duper wide flattened stalk, along with other irregularities. Call it strange and you’ll get no argument from me.

I chose to post these pictures today to coincide with Wonderful Weirdos Day, even if the creators of that celebration, being people, had their own kind in mind. All I can say is fasciated plants are my kind of people.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

Fasciated double Mexican hat

My first instance of fasciation for 2020 came on May 16th along Lost Horizon Drive. Mexican hats (Ratibida columnifera) in my neighborhood were approaching their peak around then, so I made plenty of portraits, individually and in small groups. (That’s also where I photographed a beetle on a buffalo gourd flower.) On the way back to my car after working for a couple of hours I noticed the double Mexican hat shown here. The fact that the flower stem was a little flattened suggested that fasciation was at work. What I find unusual, even for that phenomenon, is that the flower head on the right was so much more developed than the one on the left. If you’d like to see other instances of fasciation, you can scroll through some.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

Huffman Prairie Pink

Huffman Prairie looms large in the history of aviation because it’s the place in Dayton, Ohio, where the Wright Brothers improved their early flying machines to the point of being reliably controllable in the air. According to a source that I read during our trip, Huffman Prairie also happens to be the largest native prairie remnant in the state of Ohio today. When we visited on July 21st we found plenty of wildflowers managing to flourish in the glaring summer light and heat. Prominent among them was a colony of echinacea (Echinacea purpurea.)

Here’s what an individual flower head looks like:

And here’s a somewhat bedraggled fasciated double flower head I noticed there:

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

Add some fasciated flower heads

On April 12th, when I came back along the same path west of Morado Circle that I would end up spending almost three hours on, something caught my attention that I’d walked right past on the outbound stretch: a four-nerve daisy (Tetraneuris spp.) that didn’t look right. When I bent down to check it out, I saw that it was fasciated. The stem was flattened and partly concave, and two flower heads were glommed together.

After taking a bunch of pictures from various angles, I noticed another fasciated four-nerve daisy close by (see below). The unusual features in these photos are typical of fasciation. To see other such plants that have appeared here, you can click the “fasciation” tag at the end and scroll through a dozen relevant posts.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

Fasciation comes to a black-eyed susan

Near the end of my visit to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center on September 26th I photographed some seed head remains of black-eyed susans, Rudbeckia hirta. Here’s one of them, in which you can confirm the usual thimble shape:

Then I spotted an obviously fasciated specimen, with a flattened stem and a bunch of seed heads glommed together into an irregular bundle:

Click the “fasciation” tag below if you’d like to learn more about the phenomenon and see other examples I’ve shown over the years.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman