Cryptantha thyrsiflora

Atop Scott’s Bluff in western Nebraska I saw some smallish white flowers that later got identified as Cryptantha thyrsiflora. Vernacular names for the plant include calcareous cryptantha, calcareous popcornflower, limestone cat’s eye, mountain cat’s eye, and miner’s candle. By the time I took this picture on May 29th, many of the flowers had already wilted, as you can see.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

That snow and ice I mentioned last time

Yup, still plenty of cold white stuff at the higher elevations in Rocky Mountain National Park on June 5th. The two-lane road through the park was clear and dry, but in one place I caught sight of a parked snow plow, and piled up in several other places right along the road I saw walls of white that I assume arose from the work the plow had done some days earlier. Striations don’t come from geology alone.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

Death camas

On May 29th atop Scott’s Bluff National Monument in Nebraska I found no shortage of Zigandenus venenosus flowers. You can recognize that the scientific species name means ‘poisonous.’ The common name death camas is no exaggeration, as people have died from eating the various species of this pretty wildflower. And speaking of the genus Zigadenus, a few of you may remember that I belatedly showed an Austin species back in 2015.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

Two rain-lilies touching

Two rain-lilies (Cooperia drummondii) touching along Balcones Woods Drive in Austin on July 1st.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

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