More stonecrop

 

A post two days ago showed you how lush the yellow stonecrop (Sedum nuttallianum) was at Inks Lake State Park, an hour west of home, on May 26th. In fact it was probably the best crop of stonecrop I’ve ever seen anywhere, so here are more pictures of it.

 

 

And how could I resist pointing out that the bedrock gneiss is nice to photograph stonecrop on?

 

 

 

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Proponents of the race-as-social-construct conceit are enraged that human beings continue to identify each other’s race accurately.

That’s from Heather MacDonald’s insightful new book When Race Trumps Merit. She does
a good job of documenting rampant double standards, which of course are no standards at all.

 

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

More roadside delights from Inks Lake State Park

 

Here’s another wildflowerful spot along Park Road 4 in Inks Lake State Park that caught my attention on May 26th, particularly because of the white flowers, which are lazy daisies (Aphanostephus skirrhobasis). The red flower heads are blanketflowers, perhaps Gaillardia amblyodon, which is all red, rather than the more common G. pulchella, whose ray tips are yellow. There are two kinds of yellow flower heads with brown centers: Coreopsis basalis, known as goldenmane tickseed, golden-wave, or just plain coreopsis; and Helenium amarum var. badium, called brown bitterweed. The closer view below shows you what lazy daisies look like.

 

 

 

  

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“It’s just as if a man were wounded with an arrow thickly smeared with poison. His friends and companions, kinsmen and relatives would provide him with a surgeon, and the man would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble warrior, a priest, a merchant, or a worker.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know the given name and clan name of the man who wounded me… until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short… until I know whether he was dark, ruddy-brown, or golden-colored… until I know his home village, town, or city… until I know whether the bow with which I was wounded was a long bow or a crossbow… until I know whether the bowstring with which I was wounded was fiber, bamboo threads, sinew, hemp, or bark… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was wild or cultivated… until I know whether the feathers of the shaft with which I was wounded were those of a vulture, a stork, a hawk, a peacock, or another bird… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was bound with the sinew of an ox, a water buffalo, a langur, or a monkey.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was that of a common arrow, a curved arrow, a barbed, a calf-toothed, or an oleander arrow.’ The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him.”

 

That’s known as the Parable of the Arrow, and the speaker of those lines was Siddhartha Gautama, by then known as the Buddha. In his teachings he steered clear of theoretical and metaphysical speculations, preferring to find practical ways of dealing with life’s problems. There’s much to be said for that approach.

 

 

 © 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

More from Inks Lake State Park

 

Here’s a spot in Inks Lake State Park on May 26th that caused me to make a U-turn and pull over on Park Road 4. The red flower heads are blanketflowers, perhaps Gaillardia amblyodon, which is all red, rather than the more common G. pulchella, whose ray tips are yellow. The yellow flower heads with brown centers are Coreopsis basalis, known as goldenmane tickseed, golden-wave, or just plain coreopsis. The very low flowers growing adjacent to the road’s pavement are yellow stonecrop, Sedum nuttallianum. The second picture shows the densest part of this stonecrop colony a little farther to the right, where the exposed gneiss bedrock that makes Inks Lake State Park so scenic adds to the three-species display. And I guess I should mention the seemingly ubiquitous prickly pear cactus, Opuntia engelmannii.

 

 

 

 

 

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If you ever think about human sacrifice, you probably assume it’s a horrible practice from ancient times based on the superstitious belief that sacrificing people would cause God or the gods to favor the sacrificers. Maybe you think about Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac, as recounted in the Hebrew Bible. Or maybe you think about the human sacrifices that the Aztecs carried out in Mexico until the Spaniards conquered them in the 1500s and put an end to the practice.

You’ll probably be dismayed to learn there are groups of people in the world today who still superstitiously carry out human sacrifices. You can read an article about that continuing tradition in the African nation of Uganda. Be aware that the article includes some gruesome details.

 

 

 © 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

 

 

 

A dense brown-eyed susan colony

 

At the old Parks Spring Cemetery in the town of Manor, not far east of northern Austin, a colony of Rudbeckia hirta, known as brown- or black-eyed susans, was having a good time on May 20th. So were we.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Meadow pink

 

Across the road from the old Parks Spring Cemetery in the town of Manor (with first syllable pronounced May), not far east of Austin, lots of meadow pinks (Sabatia campestris) were in evidence on May 20th. As I don’t find that species in Austin, I was happy to see it in abundance.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Ground zero

 

W. Pflugerville Parkway at N. Heatherwilde Boulevard in Pflugerville proved to be ground zero this spring for prairie wildflowers, which abounded on all four quadrants of the increasingly busy intersection. Thankfully it wasn’t the wildflowers’ last stand—at least not yet, but all the land around that intersection is highly likely to get developed in the next few years. Consider that when I moved to Austin in 1976, Pflugerville claimed about 700 residents; by the turn of the millennium some 16,000 people lived there, and the current population estimate is 69,000.

While the southeast corner of the intersection already has a convenience store on it (and a convenient place to park it is), the land adjacent to the store is still land; you’ve already seen how densely flowerful it looked on April 29th. The northwest quadrant of the intersection is home to a church, but at least the people in charge have so far let the property around the church go to wildflowers; let’s hope that enlightenment continues. The southwest quadrant of the intersection has also been home to many wildflowers this spring.

By the time of my May 17th visit I’d already taken many photographs in those three quadrants on several earlier stops. This time I finally walked over to the northeast quadrant, which already sports a sign saying a zoning variance has been requested for that property: development can’t be far away. When I got close I happily found that horsemints (Monarda citriodora) were coming into their own on the site; they’re the little towers of flowers. Blooming among and around the horsemints were firewheels (Gaillardia pulchella) and prairie parsley (Polytaenia nuttallii). In addition, some healthy Maximilian sunflower plants (Helianthus maximiliani) bode well for the fall, providing the land hasn’t gotten razed by then.

 

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

 

Two days later

 

On May 12th, two days after taking the picture you saw last time of a basket-flower colony on the prairie in Pflugerville, I returned to the same property and took many more pictures. In this one firewheels (Gaillardia pulchella) dominated the basket-flowers (Plectocephalus americanus) and the smaller amount of prairie parsley (Polytaenia nuttallii) and Texas thistles (Cirsium texanum).

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Like a torch

 

Opening basket-flower buds (Plectocephalus americanus) often strike me as little torches.
That’s how I imagined this one on the Blackland Prairie in Pflugerville on May 14th.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Two not recently shown flowers

 

Above is a native wildflower that hasn’t appeared in these pages for a little over a year: Barbara’s buttons, Marshallia caespitosa. On May 4th I happily discovered a colony of them at the intersection of Spicewood Springs Rd. and Old Spicewood Springs Rd. On the other side of that second street I managed to photograph a flowering sprig of scarlet pea (Indigofera miniata) against an overcast sky that flash made look even darker by comparison to the bright red flowers. The last (and only) time I showed scarlet pea here was way back in 2011, the first year for Portraits of Wildflowers. What took me so long?

 

 

 

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Three quotations from Milton Friedman

 

A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

Nothing is as permanent as a temporary government program.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman