Another early wildflower
At the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center on Lincoln’s Birthday (February 12) I didn’t find many blooms, most likely because the ice storm 12 days earlier had killed off or suppressed most of the wildflowers that were starting to come up. In several places I spotted prairie fleabane daisies, Erigeron modestus. The flower heads are indeed modest in size, 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch across, but usually good for portraits as long as the photographer is willing to lie on the ground. I lay on the ground. Above is an opening bud, and below is an open flower head seen from beneath.
A layer of nearby rock provided the off-white in the the top picture. The sky provided a brighter white as the background in the bottom picture, and processing rendered it even whiter.
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Here’s more from Andrew Doyle‘s excellent and well-written 2022 book The New Puritans.
(I’ve retained his British spelling and punctuation.)
When racial inequality is considered to be present in all conceivable situations, literally anything can be problematised by activists as racist; recent examples include breakfast cereals, the countryside, cycling, tipping, traffic lights, classical music, Western philosophy, interior design, ores, punctuality and botany.
…When data explicitly show that racism is virtually non-existent in certain institutions, the notion of ‘lived experience’ is often invoked to prove the opposite. This is why the Guardian was able to run an alarmist front-page headline — ‘Revealed: the scale of racism at universities’ — even though the statistics cited in the article itself revealed that racism in higher education is remarkably uncommon. Statistics from 131 universities found that from 2014 to 2019 there were 996 formal complaints of racism, of which 367 were upheld. On average, therefore, there were only 1.5 formal complaints each year in any given institution. The Guardian nonetheless, through a series of incredible contortions of logic, cited these figures in order to prove that racism in higher education is ‘endemic’. When journalists, academics and politicians advance a worldview in direct opposition to the observable truth, they risk creating what the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas once described as a ‘legitimation crisis’, by which trust in figures of authority is irreparably depleted. As ever in such cases, the intentions might well be good. Even one incident of racial discrimination is one too many. But citing statistics in order to prove the opposite of what they suggest only sows mistrust and demeans genuine victims.
It comes down to the difference between those who wish to be combatants in the culture war and those who, like me, wish to see it come to an end. I have come to the conclusion that in order to reinvigorate social liberalism we need to be more selective. There is little point in attempting to reason with zealots who have abandoned reason in favour of insults and mindless platitudes, and who only assume the worst of anyone who dares to disagree. This is why I always block those on social media who cast insults or insist on deliberate misconstructions of my words. We make ourselves foolish by wasting our time on the congenitally intransigent. As Thomas Paine put it: ‘To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavouring to convert an atheist by scripture’.
Many who have found themselves on the receiving end of ‘cancel culture’ have been helpless to prevent the obliteration of their reputations and careers. Those who have been first to challenge the false reality promoted by the new puritans have paid a considerable price, and others will continue to do so. But there will come a point at which the numbers are too great to be ignored. To uphold liberal values has become a risky endeavour, but it is only the silence of the majority that makes it so. Even after his experiences in the Soviet gulags, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was able to reflect on the possibility that, had more people spoken out, the atrocities might have been avoided. ‘So why did I keep silent?’ he asks. ‘Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.’
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
Portraits of Wildflowers 
So cute, the pink flower. Spring is springing here too.
Alessandra Chaves
February 16, 2023 at 6:58 AM
It’s interesting how the red of the opening bud so soon turns to pink.
Happy springing spring up there, too.
Steve Schwartzman
February 16, 2023 at 8:00 AM
I won’t be seeing for a month at least.
circadianreflections
February 16, 2023 at 8:30 AM
Not unless you head south.
Steve Schwartzman
February 16, 2023 at 9:01 AM
I would call these early beauties the reward for lying down. For it would still be on the snow.
Peter Klopp
February 16, 2023 at 8:54 AM
Here there’s no snow to block the advice to go low.
Steve Schwartzman
February 16, 2023 at 9:08 AM
Small but beautiful colors.
Robert Parker
February 16, 2023 at 11:05 AM
That’s it, yes, big things in small packages.
Steve Schwartzman
February 16, 2023 at 2:14 PM
I am sorry the freeze got the newly emerging plants. The flowers you found are beautiful. You went through quite a bit lying on cold ground to get the photos.
Lavinia Ross
February 16, 2023 at 1:08 PM
I went out yesterday and was pleased to find more wildflowers coming out.
Because I do so much lying down for my closeups, for years I’ve been carrying a small mat with me to soften contact with the ground and keep some of Texas’s inhospitable things from getting at my skin.
Steve Schwartzman
February 16, 2023 at 2:18 PM
So, lying down on the job CAN be rewarding! I knew it.
Beautiful portraits. Florida has seven species in the Erigeron family, but only a couple within our central peninsula location. We’ve been spotting E. quercifolius, Oak Leaf Fleabane, more each day. Not as colorful as your specimen, but the white petals with a central yellow disk brighten up the mostly brown landscape.
Wally Jones
February 16, 2023 at 3:35 PM
That Erigeron genus sure gets around, doesn’t it? You prompted me to check just now and I found from BONAP that the United States has over 180 species:
http://bonap.net/Napa/TaxonMaps/Genus/County/Erigeron
I guess doing that research proves I’m not lying down on the job.
Steve Schwartzman
February 16, 2023 at 3:44 PM
At first, I thought your bud was the lazy daisy: Aphanostephus skirrhobasis. It’s quite common here, especially on the barrier islands, and displays the same lovely red before opening. Then I saw the genus, and was surprised. We have several Erigeron species, but I didn’t remember seeing anything like this one. In fact, it doesn’t grow here. Travis county is at the eastern fringe of its range. Once open, is lavender its normal color?
shoreacres
February 16, 2023 at 6:53 PM
The lavender is only on the underside; that’s one good reason to do some looking up from the ground, or at least tilt a flower head to see what’s underneath. The view from above is mostly white:
We have the lazy daisy in central Texas but I don’t often see it. You just prompted me to check Bill Carr’s plant list for Travis County, and to my surprise I found he includes two other Aphanostephus species: ramosissimus and riddellii. Maybe some of what I thought were lazy daisies were actually one or both of the other two. Oy vey.
Steve Schwartzman
February 16, 2023 at 7:03 PM
I wonder if whoever named those other Aphanostephus species were trying to compete with skirrhobasis. All three of those names are quite the mouthful.
shoreacres
February 16, 2023 at 7:06 PM
Yes, they are. Ramosissimus is Latin for ‘branching a lot.’ Riddellii, with its three double letters, apparently honors someone named Riddell.
Steve Schwartzman
February 16, 2023 at 7:24 PM
Very nice pairing of these two photos. As well, I like the different backgrounds for each and that in the first shot, the stem/leaf are fuzzily artistic, and in the second, the stem displays its texture.
Tina
February 16, 2023 at 8:07 PM
Those are all astute observations. For some time I’ve tried to show a species in various phases and from different angles.
Steve Schwartzman
February 16, 2023 at 8:12 PM
Modest perhaps, but lovely all the same.
Ann Mackay
February 17, 2023 at 1:23 PM
Some scientific names leave us wondering what the namer was thinking. Big things can come in small packages.
Steve Schwartzman
February 17, 2023 at 7:42 PM
Good on you for laying on the ground … always worth it Steve
Julie@frogpondfarm
February 26, 2023 at 11:14 PM
I spend more time lying on the ground than any other photographers I know. Fears about doing so are groundless.
Steve Schwartzman
February 27, 2023 at 6:52 AM