First pavonia mallow flowers in the yard
On March 23rd I glanced out a side window and saw exactly one Pavonia lasiopetala flower, the first there this year for the plant known as pavonia mallow, rose pavonia, and rock rose. A glance the next day showed two flowers open and several others in the process, so out I went with my camera. The relatively large stamen column is a prominent feature of plants in the hibiscus family, and so for photographers is its shadow.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Return to Muleshoe Bend
One of the best places we found for Texas bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis) in 2024, and in fact in any year, was Muleshoe Bend Recreation Area on the south side of the Colorado River in western Travis County. After skipping 2025, we went there again two days ago and weren’t disappointed.
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Imagine this: A young man, brilliant, driven, the son of Indian immigrants, applies to medical school. His grades are strong. His test scores are competitive. By every objective measure, he is exactly the kind of student these schools claim to want. He gets rejected everywhere. So he tries something different. Same grades. Same essays. Same human being, but this time he shaves his head, calls himself JoJo, and checks a different box on the race question. Black. He gets invited to interview at eleven medical schools, including Harvard.
You’re welcome to read the rest of the article about Harvard University.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Two ways of looking at four-nerve daisies
Along the road leading north from Glouster Bend Recreation Area on March 19th I stopped for a good group of four-nerve daisies (Tetraneuris scaposa). Different photographic techniques yielded quite different effects. In the first portrait, with the sun behind me I aimed toward a flower head with blue sky beyond it. For the second portrait I worked with the sun in front of me and positioned myself so that a different flower head lined up with a shaded area to maximize the effect of the light coming through the translucent ray florets.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Yellow once, white twice
On March 19th we drove 45 minutes northwest to Gloster Bend Recreation Area, and along the country road back out to the highway we pulled over at one place with a bunch of wildflowers. Above is a four-nerve daisy (Tetraneuris scaposa) in front of a budding white milkwort (Polygala alba). Not to upstage the milkwort, below is a spike of it in its own right on which many buds had opened or were opening.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Bluebonnets and the ghosts of bushes
On March 19th we drove 45 minutes northwest to Gloster Bend Recreation Area along the Colorado River on the off-chance the bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis) might be as good there as they’d been in some other years. No such luck, as central Texas has been in a drought. We did find some, as you see above, but not whole fields of them, as in 2024. Of more interest pictorially was the colony of poverty weed bushes (Baccharis neglecta). The species is quite opportunistic, taking advantage of low water levels to quickly colonize re-emerged land. You can see that in a post from 2014 showing dense interpenetrating colonies of bluebonnets and poverty weed. Unfortunately for poverty weed, which can’t think ahead, once water levels go back up, the plants die and turn into a ghost colony like the one below (and in the background above).
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Yesterday I became aware of a quotation that appears in many places on the Internet: “Believe you can and you’re halfway there,” attributed to Theodore Roosevelt. While he was certainly a storehouse of energy and undertook many daunting projects, the quoted words, intended as an inspiration, sound too modern to me, too much a product of self-help culture. When I searched for those words in quotation marks, meaning that I wanted an exact match, I got no hits earlier than the 1990s. Theodore Roosevelt published many books and articles and gave many speeches in a productive life that ended in 1919, so why did “Believe you can and you’re halfway there” not start appearing until the 1990s?
It’s an unfortunate reality of online life that there are people who purposely mis-attribute a thought to someone famous to give that thought “authority.” Common recipients of intentional mis-attribution are Albert Einstein, Plato, Confucius, Abraham Lincoln, and Mark Twain. I’ve grown skeptical: when I see a quotation that appears in many places but never with any specifics—like the book or article or letter or speech it’s from, or the year it was spoken or written—then I assume the person to whom the words are attributed didn’t say them. Investigations have almost always proven that assumption right.
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After writing those two paragraphs I remembered a line by Stephen Sondheim from the song “Somewhere” in West Side Story: “Hold my hand and we’re half way there.” A few hours later I came across a sentence with a similar sentiment but different wording by Theodore Herzl from his 1902 novel Altneuland (Old New Land): “If you will it, it is no dream.”
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
A new native wildflower for 2026
On March 19th we drove 45 minutes northwest to Gloster Bend Recreation Area, where I came across a low clump of wildflowers I didn’t recognize. A suggestion from Kate Dudley in Facebook’s Texas Flora group and further information from Tom Lebsack’s Texas Wildbuds seem to clinch the identification as Mendora heterophylla, known as low mendora and redbud. The second picture gives you a look inside, where you see that flowers of this species possess two stamens and one pistil.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Dandy dandelions
At Wilbarger Creek Park in Pflugerville on March 14th I did some takes
on Texas dandelion flowers and buds, Pyrrhopappus pauciflorus.
I like the illumination on the bud below.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Cauliflory
No, not cauliflowery, though the same root words are in play: Latin caulis, meaning ‘stem, stalk,’ and flōr-, meaning ‘flower.’ Cauliflory is botanicalese for the phenomenon in which flowers grow directly on a main stem or woody trunk rather than from new growth. These redbud tree flowers in Pflugerville are from March 14th.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Pink evening primrose abstractions
At Wilbarger Creek Park in Pflugerville on March 14th I made some
close abstractions of pink evening primroses, Oenothera speciosa.
If you call the second one a virtual vortex I’ll agree with you.
And if it reminds you of Matisse’s “Dance,” I’ll know why.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Pflugerville pflower pfirsts pfor 2026
March 14th brought several seasonal first flower photos in Pflugerville. Above is Gaillardia pulchella, known as firewheel and Indian blanket. You can see how the wind blew on the Blackland Prairie that day, as it often does, so I set a shutter speed of 1/500 of a second. Below is a greenthread, Thelesperma filifolium, hosting a tiny insect that might be a thrips.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Portraits of Wildflowers 