Posts Tagged ‘spring’
Densely wildflowerful
I’ve linked a larger-than-usual version of this picture. Click to expand it and see more details.
You’ve heard that some of the places in central Texas that usually produce lots of springtime flowers have fallen short this year. Still, every spring offers at least a few good displays. Take this piece of prairie in Round Rock along Gattis School Rd. across from Rolling Ridge Dr. as I happily experienced it on April 16th. The bright yellow flowers are square-bud primroses, Calylophus berlandieri. The few yellow-orange flower heads with brown centers are greenthread, Thelesperma filifolium. The predominantly red flower heads are Gaillardia pulchella, known as firewheels and Indian blankets. The violet-colored flowers are prairie verbenas, Glandularia bipinnatifida.
© 2018 Steven Schwartzman
Not everything is pristine. In fact, very little is.
As an example of the thought in the title, take these two pink evening primrose flowers, Oenothera speciosa, that I photographed near Yaupon Dr. in my extended neighborhood on April 1st. If that’s too bedraggled for your taste, I’ll relent and balance it with a picture of a pink evening primrose flower that remained mostly pristine even in the stiff breeze on the Blackland Prairie in Round Rock seven days later. So windy was it that I set the camera’s shutter at 1/800 of a second in hopes of stopping the flower’s movements. You’ll recognize that the background color comes from the colony of bluebonnets, Lupinus texensis, that the pink evening primrose had managed to find a roothold in.
© 2018 Steven Schwartzman
Four-nerve daisy upstaged
The upstager was a budding wild garlic, Allium drummondii, in the median of Morado Circle on April 5th.
© 2018 Steven Schwartzman
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
Another white variant
In a recent post you saw a pretty white variant of a spiderwort, a wildflower that is normally purple or magenta or violet. Another purplish wildflower that occasionally shades to white is the bluebonnet, Lupinus texensis, one of the five lupine species in Texas that are collectively the official state wildflower. I found this pleasantly pale bluebonnet in the median of Morado Circle in my neighborhood on April 5th. The tiny tan insect is a thrips (that’s one of those nouns ending in -s whose singular and plural are spelled and pronounced the same way, like series and species).
© 2018 Steven Schwartzman
A tiny bee
Strangely, this tiny bee didn’t leave the Texas stork’s bill (Erodium texanum) even when I handled the flower. To give you a sense of scale, I’ll add that flowers of this species are about one inch across (for the metrically minded, that’s 2.5 cm). If you’d like a closer look at the unbothered bee, click the icon below. The date was April 1st, Easter Sunday, and the place was Yaupon Dr. in my extended neighborhood.
© 2018 Steven Schwartzman
Penstemon on the prairie
It’s been four years since the first and only showing here of Penstemon cobaea, called wild foxglove, prairie penstemon, showy beard-tongue, large-flowered beard-tongue, dewflower, wild belladonna, and fairy thimbles. On April 8th I photographed some of these flowers on two properties close to the intersection of Greenhill Dr. and Old Settlers Blvd. on the Blackland Prairie in Round Rock. I couldn’t decide whether to show you the flowers in isolation against the clear sky or with a piece of the prairie behind them, so you’re getting both. You know what the flowers in the background below are.
© 2018 Steven Schwartzman
