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Look how lush the maidenhair ferns (Adiantum capillus-veneris), inland sea oats (Chasmanthum latifolium), and other plants were along the trail between Springfield Park and McKinney Falls State Park in southeast Austin on May 21st. Thanks to recent rain, drops were still falling from the roof of the dark little “grotto” at the center. Below you see what an adjacent stretch of Onion Creek was looking like. The large tree with the interesting roots at the right is a bald cypress (Taxodium distichum).

 

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Cloudscape

 

My last stop in our seven-hour wildflower chase on March 13th wasn’t for wildflowers. It was for these clouds I’d been eyeing for some time after we turned north from Nixon on FM 1117 and headed for home.

  

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A recent post made me aware of Harry Watrous (1857–1940), a traditional American figurative painter who didn’t like modernism. Turning from style to message, however, we find him very modern in the message he conveyed in a painting from around 1913, “The Drop Sinister—What Shall We Do with It?” The first part of the title refers to the “one drop rule” from the benighted days of American slavery and racism when white supremacists considered a person with any black ancestry at all, even as little as one drop of blood, to be black and therefore to be looked down upon and mistreated.

The painting shows three people, presumably a family: a light-skinned black man on one side, a seemingly white woman and blond-haired girl together on the other side. As Wikipedia notes:

It is said to be the first known portrait of an American interracial family. The father wears a clerical collar and holds a Christian newspaper in his hand; on the wall [between the husband on the left and the wife and daughter on the right] is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln and a quotation, “And God said, Let us make man in our own image after our likeness.”

The painting caused a stir when it was exhibited at the National Academy of Design and at the Century Club in New York. “Harry W. Watrous preaches and paints well an interesting sermon on the negro question in The Drop Sinister,” commented American Art News, which also called it “one of his best canvases.” This “study in the fruits of miscegenation…caused an extraordinary amount of discussion, residents of one typically Southern city threatening to wreck the art museum if it was shown there.”

The painting appears to depict a mixed marriage, which was illegal in many states at the time. The Crisis, the N.A.A.C.P. journal edited by W.E.B. DuBois, had a different idea about what was going on in the picture:

The people in this picture are all “colored”; that is to say the ancestors of all of them two or three generations ago numbered among them full-blooded Negroes. These “colored” folk married and brought to the world a little golden-haired child; today they pause for a moment and sit aghast when they think of this child’s future.

What is she? A Negro? No, she is “white.” But is she white? The United States Census says she is a “Negro.” What earthly difference does it make what she is, so long as she grows up a good, true, capable woman? But her chances for doing this are small! Why?

Because 90,000,000 of her neighbors, good Christian, noble, civilized people are going to insult her, seek to ruin her and slam the door of opportunity in her face the moment they discover “The Drop Sinister.”

The reference to people threatening to wreck an art museum if “The Drop Sinister” was shown there reminds us that in at least one respect nothing has changed in the century since Harry Watrous created his painting. We still have zealots who feel justified in attacking, even with physical violence, anyone who has ideas different from any of the zealots’ cherished beliefs.

The most recent criminal activity of that sort I’m aware of took place at the University of California, Davis on March 14th, when woke activists rioted to protest a speech by Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA. The rioters (and unfortunately many students on campus) believe Charlie Kirk is “hateful” in believing, for example, that biological men shouldn’t be allowed to compete against women in athletics. Ironically, the zealots have pushed beyond the one-drop rule of racial segregation and now follow a zero-drop rule: anyone born with not even a single drop of female blood can demand to be treated as a woman.

 

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Aotearoa comes to Padre Island

June 2nd was the first night we spent away from home in the two-and-a-quarter years since the pandemic hit. We drove 200 miles south from Austin to see the sea, or more properly the Gulf of Mexico, which is a branch of the Atlantic Ocean. Our first nature stop on the coast was the Padre Island National Seashore, where both of these dune scenes reminded me of Aotearoa, the Māori name for New Zealand that supposedly means ‘the land of the long white cloud.’ I took these pictures two minutes apart, and although a long white cloud inhabits each one, I went for different photographic treatments.

 

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Speaking of places with beaches, in a feature that aired on September 27, 2021, Sharyl Attkisson looked at the potential Puerto Rico has to supply pharmaceuticals domestically and thereby lessen the heavy dependence of the United States on foreign countries, most notably China, for our medicines. The nine-minute video focuses on two immigrants, one from Viet Nam and the other from the Dominican Republic, who are opening a pharmaceutical plant in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. Credit also goes to the mayor of that town, who shortened the process of getting all the required approvals down to a single day from what would typically take a year (why?!). Have a look.

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

Unaccustomed clouds

While driving back on May 14th from a visit to friends in the foreign country that south Austin sometimes seems to those of us from north Austin, we noticed these unaccustomedly dramatic clouds that I believe meteorologists classify as mammatus. Credit the picture to my iPhone, the only camera I had with me.

 

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And speaking of the atmosphere, here are four stories about the environment that the Good News Network recently featured:

World’s First Ocean-Assisted Carbon Removal Plant Launched in Hawaii

Scientists Power a Computer Using Only Algae and Daylight to Make the Electricity

Bronx Housing Complex Comes With Giant Machine Stomach to Turn All Food Waste Into Fertilizer

New Google Headquarters Uses ‘Dragonscale’ Solar Panels to Capture Sunlight From All Angles

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

 

 

 

What a difference the speed makes

After Austin got a bunch of rain, I headed over to Bull Creek off Lakewood Dr. on October 14th to see what sorts of pictures I could make of a waterfall there. I took the top photograph at a shutter speed of 1/8 of a second and the bottom one at only 1/1600 of a second. Neither of the images matches what my eyes and brain saw when I was at the waterfall, and that once again raises the question of what is real.

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From reading Jonathan Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge, I’ve learned a little about the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce [pronounced Purse], who lived from 1839 to 1914. Here’s a relevant passage from Peirce:

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Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy:

Do not block the way of inquiry.

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Alas, in today’s academic world, ideologues are increasingly blocking the way of inquiry by peremptorily declaring certain topics off-limits and attacking anyone who investigates those topics.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Two takes on a robber fly

On July 30th I spent some time going around the Riata Trace Pond. After I spotted a robber fly on a bulrush stalk and gradually moved toward it with my macro lens, I was pleased that it stayed put and let me take pictures. I noticed that from a certain angle I could line up the robber fly with a spot of bright vegetation beyond it, as you see above. Still, with natural light alone I couldn’t muster much depth of field, so I walked back out through the brush to where I’d left my bag, put a flash on the camera, and returned. Aiming from a different angle, I saw for the first time that the robber fly had caught a bee.

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And here’s a bit of advice from the Dalai Lama: “Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open.” In 2018, Mercedes Benz quoted that wise thought as part of an Instagram post hashtagged MondayMotivation. According to Suzi Weiss, “The line sparked an uproar in Beijing, and the German carmaker quickly apologized.” I invite you to read the full July 2021 article by Suzi Weiss, which includes an interview with Patrick Wack, who has documented the depredations that the Chinese government has been perpetrating against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang Province.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Firewheel in summer

You’ve seen posts this past spring, as every spring for the last decade, showing firewheels (Gaillardia pulchella) at their densely flowering peak. Even after that colonial grandeur fades, individual firewheels in diminishing numbers come up through the summer and into the fall. Here’s an example of one from Great Hills Park on July 23rd. Whether the ray floret at the center had curled naturally or was pulled out of its normal orientation by a spider or other critter, I don’t know.

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By personality and as a math teacher I strive for accuracy. Even so, as the Romans properly held, errare humanum est, it’s only human to make mistakes. If you’re aware that anything I’ve said in my commentaries is factually incorrect, please point it out and bring forth the evidence so I can fix those mistakes. Opinions, of course, are a different matter: even with agreed-upon facts, people can and do differ on how to interpret them and what, if anything, to do about them.

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I think most Americans would be shocked to learn, as I was, that in many circumstances the police in the United States are legally allowed to lie to people during interrogations. You can read more about that in an article by The Innocence Project.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Another announcer of botanical fall

In a recent post I showed my first Maximilian sunflower for 2021. On that same day, July 31, near a pond off Kulmbacher Dr. in far north Austin I also saw my first snow-on-the-prairie plants (Euphorbia bicolor) for this year. The one pictured above hadn’t flowered yet; the one below had.

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Here’s another passage by Wendell Berry, this time from his 1998 essay “In Distrust of Movements”: “Once we allow our language to mean anything that anybody wants it to mean, it becomes impossible to mean what we say. When ‘homemade’ ceases to mean neither more nor less than ‘made at home,’ then it means anything, which is to say that it means nothing. The same decay is at work on words such as ‘conversation,’ ‘sustainable,’ ‘safe,’ ‘natural,’ ‘healthful, ‘sanitary,’ and ‘organic.’ The use of such words now requires the most exacting control of context and the use immediately of illustrative examples.”

You’ve probably noticed supermarkets selling mass-produced foods labeled ‘homemade.’ I just discovered there’s a brand of ice cream with that name, which I assure you health authorities don’t allow to be made in the homes of the company’s workers. And think of all the products in supermarkets labeled ‘natural,’ a term that has no legal definition that those companies must guarantee their foods comply with. A food can contain artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives yet still be labeled ‘natural.’ Oh well, I guess it’s only natural that hype is a part of human nature.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Exuiviae in the park

Near the end of my picture-taking in Great Hills Park on July 23rd I spotted the cicada exuviae you see above. It reminds me that my father used to like the phrase “a face that only a mother could love.”

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And here’s a thought from Wendell Berry: “When else in history would you find ‘educated’ people who know more about sports than about the history of their country, or uneducated people who do not know the stories of their families and communities?” That’s from his 1989 essay “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine.” Wendell Berry is still alive; in fact today marks his 87th birthday. As far as I know, he still writes with a pencil rather than on a computer. He might be happy that computers at least allow people to go to sites like ancestry.com to learn “the stories of their families” that he was concerned about. That aside, “educated” people not knowing the history of their country has remained a big problem in the 32 years since Berry wrote his essay. In fact the problem has gotten worse. As evidence, take a 2016 study which “found that less than one third of U.S. News & World Report’s top 25 liberal arts colleges, top 25 national universities, and top 25 public institutions require U.S. history as a requirement for history majors.”

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Two kinds of sunflowers in one morning

I’ve never seen as many “common” sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) still flowering at the beginning of August as I have this year. Maybe it’s a consequence of the sustained freeze we endured back in February. Whatever the reason, as I drive around town now groups of those sunflowers seem to be everywhere. The picture above shows one flower head at a pond on Kulmbacher Dr. in far north Austin on the morning of July 31st. A little earlier that day I’d seen my first Maximilian sunflowers (Helianthus maximiliani) of the year at the corner of FM 1325 and Shoreline Drive, as shown below. Those typically fall-blooming sunflowers are a sign that despite the lingering of the common sunflowers botanical autumn is at hand.

In 1597, herbalist John Gerard commented: “The Indian Sun or golden floure of Peru is a plant of such stature and talnesse that in one Sommer being sowne of a seede in Aprill, it hath risen up to… fourteene foot in my garden, one floure was in weight three pound and two ounces, and crosse overthwart the floure by measure sixteene inches broad.”

From the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1805 we have this: “Along the bottoms, which have a covering of high grass, we observe the sunflower blooming in great abundance. The Indians of the Missouri, and more especially those who do not cultivate maize, make great use of the seed of this plant for bread or in thickening their soup. They first parch and then pound it between two stones until it is reduced to a fine meal. Sometimes they add a portion of water, and drink it thus diluted: at other times they add a sufficient proportion of marrow grease to reduce it to the consistency of common dough and eat it in that manner. This last composition we preferred to all the rest, and thought it at that time a very palatable dish.”

And in the 1899 book The English Flower Garden, W. Robinson wrote: “It is true that not a few of this genus [Helianthus] are coarse and weedy… All the larger kinds are noble plants.” For me they’re all noble plants.

(I’ve interrupted the Portraits from Our Yard series for one day and will do so again periodically to keep you up to date with current botanical developments.)

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman