Posts Tagged ‘green’
Indian paintbrush colony flowering
On April 10th we followed leads from Craig78681 and Betty Wilkins to head southeast in search of good wildflower displays. We ended up driving a 114-mile circuit that took us as far to the southeast as the intersection of TX 20 and TX 71 outside Bastrop. Today’s photograph shows the welcoming Indian paintbrush colony (Castilleja indivisa) we found there. That display made quite a contrast with Austin, where we didn’t see a lot of Indian paintbrushes this spring.
© 2018 Steven Schwartzman
The end of winter
Today, March 20th, marks the official end of winter this year. Nature in Austin hadn’t waited that long. The photograph above, taken six days ago at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, shows a possumhaw tree (Ilex decidua) that had largely greened out while still densely laden with the bright red fruits it wore all winter. A clear blue sky pleasantly set off the other two colors. Aiming upward near midday let sunlight transluce the new leaves.
(Not long ago you saw a landscape view from Valentine’s Day showing a possumhaw in its winter form, which is to say totally leafless.)
© 2018 Steven Schwartzman
New Zealand: green is the color of Riccarton Bush
A year ago today we visited Riccarton Bush in Christchurch.
As you can see, the place is heavily shaded. The green of and on the dense vegetation predominates.
If you’d like to read more about the history of this area, click the image of the plaque and it will enlarge; then click again and you should be able to make out the words.
© 2018 Steven Schwartzman
Red and green redux
Continuing with yesterday’s red-and-green theme, here’s an abstract picture showing the fruit and out-of-focus leaves of thimbleberry, Rubus parviflorus, in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, on August 29th.
The Rubus species that’s widespread in Austin is R. trivialis.
© 2017 Steven Schwartzman
Appropriate for the occasion
Because red and green and snow and holly will speak to many of you today, here’s another picture of a yaupon holly (Ilex vomitoria) in Great Hills Park the morning after the rare snow that fell on December 7th.
© 2017 Steven Schwartzman
Haven’t shown you this for a good while
2014 was the last time I showed you a flower of the pearl milkweed vine, Matelea reticulata. To compensate for that long lapse, here you have not one but two pearl milkweed flowers I photographed on a vine in my neighborhood on June 22nd. What happy propinquity.
If these flowers weren’t so common here, they’d be rare.* What I mean is that while pearl milkweed readily grows in northwest Austin, it’s easy to forget how seldom we see green flowers, much less any that possess net-like patterns and have a tiny pearly shelter covering their center. Notice that the central structure is curvily pentagonal, with each vertex gesturing toward the tip of a pointy petal. Milkweeds speak in fives.**
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* Google turned up no hits for “If they weren’t so common, they’d be rare,” so I’ll claim that witticism.
** In this case Google says I’ve just spoken a novel four-word sentence about fiveness.
© 2017 Steven Schwartzman
New Zealand: Kahikatea
The little reserve in central Christchurch known as Riccarton Bush is home to some trees known botanically as Dacrycarpus dacrydioides, in Māori as kahikatea, and in English as white pine. Unlike the many imported species of pine covering so much of New Zealand, this tree is native. In fact, as you can see from the plaque at the end of this post, the kahikatea is the tallest native tree in the country.
The roots of some of the venerable kahikatea trees I saw on March 1st were impressive. Judging from what I’ve found on the Internet, I haven’t been alone in photographing these very ones:
Here’s an informational plaque that stands in Riccarton Bush:
© 2017 Steven Schwartzman
