Posts Tagged ‘Texas’
The old Merrilltown Cemetery
On May 30th the old Merrilltown Cemetery up north along Burnet Rd. wasn’t as splendiferously covered with wildflowers as some of the cemeteries I showed early this spring. It was, however, home to a good smattering of Texas dandelions (Pyrrhopappus pauciflorus), as you see below. One of them became the subject of the mandala-like portrait above, in which flash caused the clear blue sky to appear much darker than it really was.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
Chipping away at being on a lark
On May 27th I stopped at the St. David’s Emergency Center in Leander. No, I wasn’t having a medical emergency; I just wanted to photograph the wildflowers on the adjacent property. Barbed wire kept me at a distance so I used my longest lens, the 100–400mm, knowing I’d get an in-focus band across the middle of a picture that cropping at the top and bottom would turn into more of a panorama. The purple flowers are horsemints (Monarda citriodora), the red and yellow ones firewheels (Gaillardia pulchella), and the broad white ones basket-flowers (Plectocephalus americanus).
At one point a couple of small birds landed on a part of the barbed-wire fence. As I already had the telephoto lens on the camera I figured I’d pretend to be a bird photographer. Advancing slowly, I took what pictures I could, still farther away than I’d have liked.
A look through a Texas bird book made me think the birds were chipping sparrows (Spizella passerina), but after Deborah Zajac saw this post she suggested the birds were likely lark sparrows (Chondestes grammacus). The picture of the lark sparrow in The Birds of Texas does seem a better match. Live and learn.
In the pose below, the sparrow seemed a bit put out by my presence.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
12 Years
Twelve years ago today the first post appeared in Portraits of Wildflowers. The photograph in that post showed a single basket-flower. In contrast, today’s picture includes the densest and most expansive colony of horsemints (Monarda citriodora) I’ve seen in maybe two decades. I photographed it on May 28th in between US 183 and the 183A toll road in Leander. Unfortunately construction is already under way on parts of the field, so 2023 may mark this great colony’s last stand.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
National Prairie Day
The first Saturday in June each year is National Prairie Day. In my part of Texas, Pflugerville proved to be ground zero for lush spreads of prairie wildflowers in the spring of 2023, as you’ve already seen in a bunch of recent posts. Here’s a picture showing basket-flowers (Plectocephalus americanus) abounding on the Blackland Prairie in Pflugerville on May 29th. What a sight!
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
It wasn’t just Inks Lake State Park
It wasn’t just Inks Lake State Park that was spectacularly flowerful on March 26th. We found that many places along TX 29 from Liberty Hill in Williamson County all the way to the turnoff for the park also sported wildflower displays better than I’d ever seen on that stretch of highway. Here are two views from TX 29 east of the junction with Park Road 4. The red blanketflowers seem to be Gaillardia amblyodon. The brown-centered yellow flower heads are Coreopsis basalis. The white ones are lazy daisies, Aphanostephus skirrhobasis. The all-yellow flower heads appear to be sleepy daisies, Xanthisma texanum subsp. drummondii.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
How gneiss
As you’ve seen, Inks Lake State Park was spectacularly flowerful on March 26th. One of the park’s attractions is all-seasonal: the gneiss bedrock, which has broken the surface in various places and also given rise to boulders. The wildflowers above are Coreopsis basalis, known as golden-wave, goldenmane tickseed, and just plain coreopsis.
Lichens have made many rock surfaces their homes, as you see in these three views.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
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
Portraits of Wildflowers 