Here's one of those flowers that's so ubiquitous that it's easy not to notice. It is a pretty little thing, though (humble yet lovable, just like Underdog) -- wild garlic (Allium drummondii).
The winter and spring of 2003-2003 have been really unusual in terms of weather patterns. First, we had an extremely wet winter; it basically just kept raining and raining and raining. (If you're not familiar with Central Texas, let me tell you that this is not the normal course of events!). We were all thinking "ooh, this should be a great wildflower year!"
It was also pretty mild. We had very little really cold weather, and almost no freezing. Usually, our coldest weather (ice storms, if we're to have one) is in January. This year, we hardly had any freezes until KABOOM! late March, a two-day ice-and-sleet storm that shut down many towns and cities altogether (including Austin). Talk about a shock! It also virtually wiped out the Stonewall/Fredericksburg peach crop for this year. The trees had already set fruit, and the little things just didn't have a chance.
And that was about the time it stopped raining. After the wettest winter in years, now we have the driest April in years. It's caused some strange patterns in what's blooming nd what's not, but ... here are some things I see in our front yard this year.
Here's one of those flowers that's so ubiquitous that it's easy not to notice. It is a pretty little thing, though (humble yet lovable, just like Underdog) -- wild garlic (Allium drummondii).
And you might remember that my very favorite is blackfoot daisy (Melampodium leucanthum)? Well, here it is in all its splendid white glory, nestled in with a patch of wild garlic (Allium drummondii).
Another one of the white flowers here in the spring is a fleabane (I'm not really sure about the species, but I'm going with Prairie fleabane, Erigeron modestus). You can see that the flowers are roughly the same size as the blackfoot daisy's, but the petals are really skinny and threadlike -- there might be 50-70 on one flower! It's a perennial.
OK, just one more white one: Barbara's buttons, Marshallia caespitosa). The plant itself looks a lot like bitterweed (narrow leaves coming up from one point at the base), but the flower is completely different. It's very lacy and airy-looking, and from a distance it almost looks like a grayish white (compared to the blackfoot daisies, at least!). When these things go to seed, the finches and other little birds love to perch up on the end of the stalk and just eat them to a nubbin!
Short, clumpy mounds of solid purple are usually bushy skullcap (Scutellaria wrightii). This picture doesn't give much of a sense of the plant, because I wanted to get a real closeup of the flowers and the little reddish leftover seed covers that gave it the name "skullcap". You can see a couple near the center of the photo; they're upside-down, like little shallow cups.
This flower, for some reason, isn't very noticeable along the roadsides. I think it's very attractive. It reminds me of "obedient plant", but it's really prairie brazoria (Warnockia scutellarioides). This picture doesn't really do it justice -- this one's not completely open yet. I'll try and catch a better one in a few days.
When we moved into our house, the front yard was just blanketed with this flower, prairie verbena (Glandularia bipinnatifida). I thought that must be be all we'd ever see, but the next year there was hardly any, and the population since has been really variable. (The seed banks in the soil are remarkable!) What I find really striking about verbena is that they stay in bloom so long, and the picture shows why. The bloom on the left is a new one; you can see the ring of flowers just by the stem, and then a spiky-looking center. As the bloom ages, the outside ring fades, and the center section pushes out another ring of petals. The bloom on the right side is an old one, and you see the really long spiky stuff along the stem "below" the flowers? That's the gone-to-seed earlier flowers. (You can see another old bloom in the right background, with even clearer spiky seed portions.) It's the same way palm trees grow; the new leaves come out from the middle, and the old ones just wither back and drop down beside the trunk.
This has to be one of the most artificial-looking wildflowers in the world! When I first saw it, I thought it must be plastic. It's a milkweed, locally called antelope-horns (Asclepias asperula). What is even more bizarre is the pods that these flowers turn into as they go to seed.
OK, here are a couple of shots of the pods, taken about 2 weeks after the flower picture above.
They're in varying states of maturity: some still green, some already ripening to red -- but they're not yet at the dried stage, where they burst open and all the seeds fly away on their puffy skirts of white silky fibers. I hope to get a shot of that, too.
Here's a flower that's not very showy (it has really scrawny, or sometimes no, petals (or ray flowers, as they're correctly called). But it kind of grows on me... it's called nerve ray, or square-bud daisy (Tetragonotheca texana). Look at the variety of petal formations on the right-hand picture! You can see (out of focus) one of the square buds in the left-hand photo.
This yellow, on the other hand, I find quite showy because of the way the flowers are all crowded up at the top, although it tends to be not very abundant. It's two-leaf senna (Cassia roemeriana) -- see how the leaves grow in a sort of chevron-shaped pair?. It's smaller than its relative, Lindheimer's or velvet-leaf senna (Cassia lindheimeriana), which is sometimes cultivated as a landscape plant.
Here's a really easy-to-overlook white one: milkwort (Polygala alba). It often grows in profusion along the roadsides, but each flower stalk is only about 3-5 inches long and very slender, so it's easy to gloss over.