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
Unseen spiders
On March 13th I noticed that since I’d last looked a couple of days earlier, some bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis) had come up at the Floral Park Dr. entrance to Great Hills Park. I made portraits of several, not realizing till after I looked at this one on my computer monitor that a small spider had been there. In contrast, with the droplet-doused web below, the spider that made it was presumably deep down in the funnel and therefore not visible. (The funnel is the darker, roughly oval area in the center about a quarter of the way down from the top.)
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Seasonal flower firsts from the old Merrilltown Cemetery
At the old Merrilltown Cemetery on March 14th I found some wild garlic
(Allium drummondii) and ten-petal anemones (Anemone berlandieri).
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
A trio con brio — twice
On March 13th I glimpsed a cluster of flowers on a red buckeye bush (Aesculus pavia var. pavia) in Great Hills Park. Of the various pictures I took, this one of three flowers all in a row differs from any I remember taking in previous years. Coincidentally, the day before in our yard I’d found three southern dewberry flowers similarly lined up. In the top portrait I aimed sideways, and in the bottom one straight down.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
First prairie verbena flowers of the season
Glandularia bipinnatifida on March 12th in north Austin.
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“Jerusalem”: words by William Blake; music by Hubert Parry;
orchestration by Edward Elgar; performed at BBC Proms in 2018.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Swing low, sweet violets, coming forth to brighten our home
Behind our house on March 4th I almost walked right past two inconspicuous Missouri violet flowers (Viola missouriensis) that had come up in one of the very narrow bands of earth separating bricks in a walkway. A closer look revealed a lot more.
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“Lessons in Freedom—from Jimmy Lai and My Daughter Alysa,” by Arthur Liu.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Yellows on two parts of a plant
When I walked a ways into Great Hills Park on March 4th I found several agarita bushes (Berberis trifoliolata) busily blossoming, as you see in the closeup above of flowers and buds. Different yellows, along with reds and oranges, adorned the leaflet highlighted below.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
White and the ghost of white
Along the west side of our house on March 4th I made some portraits of the cleavers (Galium aparine) that have been coming up there unbidden each spring for the past few years. I got in as close as my macro lens would allow because cleavers flowers are tiny, only 2–3mm across. (Interestingly, when I searched online to get that precise measurement of the flowers’ size, a visual hit that accompanied the verbal one was the photograph from a post of mine in 2023.) Haunting the cleavers plant and harmonizing with its flowers is the ghost of the southern dewberry flower (Rubus trivialis) that appeared unghosted, which is to say not banished to bokeh, in a recent post.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Not a closeup
Been showing a lot of closeups with dark backgrounds lately, so here for variety are two broader views from the west side of Mopac north of Braker Lane on March 8th. The first shows a blossoming redbud tree that seems to have come up on its own, though one person suggested it might be the progeny of a cultivated redbud somewhere else in the vicinity. The other picture shows a colony of southern dewberries (Rubus trivialis) ornamenting a creekside. (Might have to stop by there next month to see about some berry picking.) If you want a reminder of what dewberry flowers look like close up, you can check a recent post.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
A star and a spiral
Most daisy-like flowers have varying numbers of ray florets. Count Lindheimera texana as an exception: it always produces five rays. That’s one reason people call it Texas yellow star, matching the five-pointed star on the Texas flag—and on the original state flag the star was indeed yellow. You see a different natural design in the spiral of a snail’s shell. Both portraits come from March 2nd along Jefferson Street where it runs adjacent to Shoal Creek.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Portraits of Wildflowers 
