When pink is white

Last June, after arriving home from a sight-filled trip to the Chicago area, I wondered if it was too late for the season’s mountain pinks (Centaurium beyrichii) back in Austin. It wasn’t, as I showed in a post entitled “I would have missed them if I’d missed them.” This year, after we returned from our latest American road odyssey, I wondered the same thing. On June 21st I went out to check the likely places along Capital of Texas Highway, which swings a big arc through the hilly country on the west side of Austin. Although I found the expected mountain pinks, they looked a bit past their prime, or possibly 2017 was a meager year for them. Still, I did take some pictures, and while I was doing so a young Chinese guy walked by and asked if I’d seen the naturally white variant of mountain pinks nearby. When I asked where, he pointed and said they were about a hundred feet down the road. He walked on, and I went in the opposite direction, to the place he’d indicated. Sure enough, I found several mountain pink plants with white flowers.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

Finally

My first pictures at the “vacant” lot in Cedar Park on May 6th were of the coreopsis colony that had brought me there on that sunny morning. Then I looked around to see what else was growing on the property. One find was a species I’d seen for years in Wildflowers of the Texas Hill Country but had never encountered in person: cut-leaf germander, Teucrium laciniatum. In the second photograph, the yellow-orange daubs in the background came from coreopsis flowers.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Hooker’s mountain daisy

At the Orokonui Ecosanctuary northeast of Dunedin on February 27th we saw some Hooker’s mountain daisies (Celmisia hookeri), a species classified as being at risk. Notice the white-margined leaves.

As with many other plants in the sunflower family, this one’s flower heads give way to puffball-type seed heads.

After the seeds fall away, the remains are rather sculptural:

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

Texas bindweed flower and tendril

From April 13th in Great Hills Park, the picture above gives you a downward look at a Texas bindweed flower, Convolvulus equitans. Plants in the genus Convolvulus do indeed convolve, as confirmed by the photograph below, which shows a questing Texas bindweed tendril wrapping itself around some prairie verbena flowers, Glandularia bipinnatifida.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

What f/2.8 will get you

A large aperture of f/2.8 will get you a soft portrait like this one of a rain-lily bud (Cooperia pedunculata) on Floral Park Dr. in my neighborhood on April 1st.

I threw away many of the pictures I took of this bud because I hadn’t managed to get enough in focus to please me. In this frame I was surprised that I got good focus not only on the nearest surface of the bud but also on the tip of the maroon sheath.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

Bouchetia erecta

March 30th was an unusually cool day in Austin: high 50s in the morning and a maximum around 76° in the afternoon. With weather like that bound not to last long in this land of heat, out I went to the natural area in my neighborhood that I’ve often visited along Yaupon Dr. beneath the large power lines. There in a limestone meadow I found a small white flower nestled up against the even smaller pink flowers of some wild garlic, Allium drummondii. Thanks to Joe Marcus, I learned that the little white flower is Bouchetia erecta, a member of the nightshade family. This species, which is endemic to Texas, goes by the common names erect bouchetia and painted tongue.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

A multitude of white

On March 30th in a meadow underlain with limestone I found a dense colony of flowering Valerianella amarella, known by the strange common name of corn salad. By comparing the size of the prickly pear cactus pads, you can see that corn salad flowers are small. In fact they’re even smaller than you might think, because each dab of white in the picture above is actually a cluster of little flowers. Here’s a closeup of one cluster:

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman