With the start of Spring, one can see a variety of wild flowers in Plano, without having to go far from home. Most of the urban areas in Texas have been built over and near prairie grasslands, which are replete with all kinds of grasses and flowers in the season. Even in our apartment community, just a patch of unused land a few feet across turned up more than ten different flowering plants.
Over the last few days, Poonam, Raghav and I, equipped with '
Texas Wildflowers: a field guide' by Campbell, Loughmiller, set out to learn something of the flowers we see around us. Just our community campus, the local trail I run on and the park 5 miles away yielded us a trove of flowers. We managed to refresh our botany knowledge a bit along the way (Apparently, the sunflower is not a single flower, but a close set collection of scores of small flowers: Look up
Pseudanthium in Wikipedia).
Some of the flowers here (
also see Poonam and Raghav's artistic impressions of those flowers):
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| Nodding Thistle in a field of Indian Blankets |
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| Primrose in the grass |
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Evening Primrose
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| Poonam's artistic rendition |
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Honeysuckle |
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Basket Flower
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Raghav's basket flower (the coloring)
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| Mealy Sage |
The rest of the flowers are here:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/118410535114405744743/albums/6015735419992247809