Blackfoot daisies, one and many

Way back on March 31st I made a portrait of a blackfoot daisy flower head, Melampodium leucanthum, along Yaupon Dr. in my extended neighborhood. Then on April 17th I photographed a colony of flowering blackfoot daisies beneath the power lines west of Morado Circle.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

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More pink (and white) evening primroses

A recent post showed you two less-than-pristine pink evening primrose flowers, Oenothera speciosa, and then compensated with one fresh specimen. Now here are two flourishing groups from April 10th along TX 20 east of Red Rock in Bastrop County. The colony above was mixed with some Indian paintbrushes, Castilleja indivisa. In the group below, the majority of the pink evening primrose flowers were natural white variants.

Two days earlier, at the site in Round Rock documented in the other post, I’d already found a few isolated white pink evening primroses, including the one below that I photographed with the sun beyond it to create shadows of the flower’s interior parts.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

White prickly poppy center

Here’s a close and downward look at Argemone albiflora, the white prickly poppy. Notice the crowd of yellow stamens invariably paying homage to the red-topped pistil that rises above them in the center of the flower. This photograph is from Great Hills Park on April 23, 2013, five years ago today. I’d planned to show the picture soon afterward but put the post aside and only recently rediscovered it. Better late than never.

© 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

Southern dewberry flower and opening bud

Rubus trivialis; Great Hills Park; March 29. If crinkles are your thing, this flower’s for you.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

Two days later

The previous post showed a close view from two days ago of a reddish rain-lily stalk (Cooperia pedunculata) barely poking above the ground. This morning I went back to the same place in my neighborhood and found some of the rain-lilies had progressed to the stage shown here: this flower stalk had risen to its full height, in the process pushing through and casting aside its maroon sheath in the way that a rocket launched into space releases its moorings upon takeoff. The flower had yet to open fully, perhaps held back by the overcast sky.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

When purple is white

Several times over the years that these posts have been appearing I’ve pointed out that purple flowers seem more disposed than those of other colors to produce naturally occurring white variants. That was clearly the case with some spiderworts (Tradescantia spp.) that caught my attention at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center on March 14th. You can see residual traces of purple in those flowers.

Two years ago you saw a largely white variant of a bluebonnet. (Most bluebonnets strike me as purple rather than blue.)

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman