Posts Tagged ‘white’
Delta arrowhead
After seven years of promoting local native wildflowers, here’s one I’ve never shown before: Sagittaria platyphylla, called delta arrowhead. I photographed it in a pond on the Blackland Prairie in northeast Texas on August 17th. Light reflecting off water droplets and passing through my camera lens caused the little nonagons in the upper right. I could’ve taken them out but left them in in the interest of geometry (and so I could write a sentence with in in in it—which now means I’ve also written a sentence with in in in in it, and could extend the series at will).
© 2018 Steven Schwartzman
Snow at the hottest time of the year
On August 17th on the Blackland Prairie in northeast Austin I photographed some snow-on-the-prairie (Euphorbia bicolor) just a few feet from the partridge pea you saw here last time.
From a distance, many people incorrectly assume the green and white bracts are part of the flower; actually those patterned bracts are specialized leaves. Even the lobed white “collar” around the stamens isn’t part of the flower, nor are the smaller involucral glands those lobes are appended to. In spite of appearances, this flower has no petals. For a much closer look, click the icon below.
© 2018 Steven Schwartzman
Mountain laurel
Over here we’ve got Texas mountain laurel. At the Garden in the Woods in Framingham, Massachusetts, on June 12th I finally got to see the mountain laurel, Kalmia latifolia, I’d heard about for years. Names to the contrary, neither of the mountain laurels is in the laurel family: the Texas one is a legume, while Kalmia belongs to the Ericaceae, or heather family.
© 2018 Steven Schwartzman
Great ground cover at Ovens Natural Park
It wasn’t only the rocks and seaweed that warranted attention at Ovens Natural Park in Nova Scotia on June 4th. Just slightly inland from the shore I discovered first one plant and then another that had enough extra shelter to form a ground cover. The colony with white wildflowers is Cornus canadensis, known as creeping dogwood or bunchberry.
The ground cover with yellow wildflowers is silverweed, either Argentina pacifica or Argentina anserina.
Even when the terrain wasn’t flat and sheltered enough for silverweed to form a colony, here and there I found an isolated plant staking claim to a precarious existence among the rocks right at the shore.
Thanks to Ana at Ovens Natural Park for identifying these wildflowers.
© 2018 Steven Schwartzman
A drooping rain-lily
Because Austin had gotten some recent rain and I’d seen a few stray rain-lilies around town, on the morning of July 11th I went to an undeveloped lot on Balcones Woods Dr. where I’ve come to rely on finding rain-lilies and copper-lilies. While I found not a single one of the latter, I did find a scattering of the former.
In particular, I noticed one rain-lily (Cooperia pedunculata) that was bent over and configured in a way I don’t recall ever seeing before. That was good news, because after two decades of photographing rain-lilies I’m always wondering if I can find a new way to portray them.
© 2018 Steven Schwartzman
A day in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains
We spent June 5th last year in parts of the Rocky Mountains northwest of Denver. There was still snow on the mountains and in some places on the ground close to roads.
© 2018 Steven Schwartzman
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
