Early buttercup (Ranunculus fascicularis) with sleeping bee
After a long day of foraging, what bee wouldn’t enjoy the opportunity to take its ease on a buttercup’s petals, or to indulge in complimentary pollen once it awoke?
This bee continued to sleep until increasing sunlight and warmth caused it to stir, shake its wings, and fly off. Perhaps it had reservations at an equally elegant and well-appointed buttercup down the road.
Eager for spring’s bold primary colors — Bluebonnets, red Indian Paintbrush, yellow Buttercups and Butterweed — it can be easy to overlook the season’s pastels. Pink, lavender, and white flowers are blooming, emerging, or already fading. It’s time to catch them, before they’re gone.
Ten-petal anemone ~ Anemone berlandieriFor years, I found only white ten-petal anemones at the Brazoria refuge. This year, to my great delight, a large colony of pink-tinged flowers appeared. The common name for this member of the buttercup family is doubly misleading, since the plant has sepals rather than petals, and the number of sepals varies widely. Some flowers have as few as six or seven sepals, while others may have more than twenty.
Like other Anemone species, this Texas native sometimes goes by the name ‘windflower.’ As with dandelions, its seeds are spread by the wind, and many already have gone to seed.
Carolina Geranium ~ Geranium carolinianumHaving been raised with big, red geraniums that spent their lives in pots, meeting the Carolina Geranium — another member of the Cranesbill family — was quite a surprise. Its flowers are only 1/4″ to 3/8″ across, and the plant itself rarely exceeds a foot in height. Where it’s allowed to flourish, it blooms prolifically, and attracts a variety of small bees, flies, and other insects.
Pink evening primrose ~ Oenothera speciosaWhen I photographed this pretty pink primrose near my home, it was the first I’d seen in this spring season. Today, small clusters of the flowers have appeared in unmown spots around town; before long, they’ll be covering fields and ditches with a lovely mixture of pink and white blooms. Given their enthusiastic spread and their ability to leave great swaths of land ‘in the pink,’ it’s easy to think of them as the ‘pinkiest’ of our spring wildflowers.
Roadside wisteria
Indian Paintbrush ~ Castilleja indivisaIn Texas, nothing says ‘spring’ like the appearance of our most common Indian paintbrush. In time, its flowers will overspread the state, combining with bluebonnets to create a riotous display of color. Today, scattered orange and red patches along various Brazoria County roadsides were enough to evoke smiles; appearing a bit later than usual, the flowers seemed to be making up for lost time.
The plants’ vibrant color comes not from petals, but from bracts surrounding their flowers; the small, greenish-yellow flowers can be seen peeking out from the bracts in the first two photos.
Castilleja species are hemiparasitic. While they develop ordinary roots of their own, once those roots touch the roots of other plants — primarily grasses, but also bluebonnets — they penetrate those roots to obtain a portion of their nutrients. The flowers I found today seemed very well fed; both their color and their number hint at a very good season ahead, and a lot of smiles.
View of the flowers and bracts from above
A more delicately-colored paintbrush
A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period —
When March is scarcely hereA Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay —A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.~ Emily Dickinson
Lagniappe 