Yellow star-grass and corn salad

Yet another species makes its debut here today: Hypoxis hirsuta, known as (eastern) yellow star-grass and common goldstar. I found a bunch of them on March 29th in the same field north of La Grange that was home to Drummond’s sandwort colonies. Nudging a different one of the yellow flowers was some flowering corn salad, Valerianella sp., as shown below.

In some places in that large field the corn salad was the star of the show, with a few Indian paintbrushes (Castilleja indivisa) and sandyland bluebonnets (Lupinus subcarnosus) mixed in.

As a long-time observer of language, in recent years I’ve noticed an upsurge in the construction “It’s not about X, it’s about Y,” spoken by politicians and activists who get interviewed on television to give their point of view about some matter that’s been in the news. My take-away is that when you hear “It’s not about X, it’s about Y,” you can be pretty sure that it really is about X, at least in part, but the speaker wants to divert your attention to Y, which is a favored policy or talking point.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Neocolonialism

Okay, it’s April Fool’s Day, and maybe the title fooled you into thinking this post has something to do with international politics. It doesn’t. Etymologically-minded me took neocolonialism literally, with neo meaning ‘new’ and colonial meaning ‘having to do with a colony.’ Today’s picture from March 29th shows the first new extensive colony of dense bluebonnets, Lupinus texensis, that we found this spring. (You’ll recall that the sustained sub-freezing spell in February delayed the appearance of many wildflowers). And by a happy coincidence these dense bluebonnets were doing their colonizing in the tiny town of Dubina, which had been the first Czech colony in Texas, about 75 miles southeast of Austin. Painting this bluebonnet colony with scattered daubs of red are Indian paintbrushes, Castilleja indivisa.

It’s not that I hadn’t been seeing individual bluebonnets and small groups of them for several weeks. I had. For example, on March 19th in Gonzales I’d photographed a fledgling (can a flower fledge?) bluebonnet that might better be called a fuzzbonnet. That time the red came from a phlox flower.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman