Varieties of frostweed ice
Here’s a follow-up with more views of frostweed plants (Verbesina virginica) that had cheerfully extruded ribbons of delicate ice when I visited nearby Great Hills Park yesterday morning. As winters pass, my collection of frostweed ice pictures has continued to grow, so coming up with original ways to portray the phenomenon gets harder. Withal*, each new encounter has brought at least some novelty.
In the top picture, I like the way the leaf edges at the lower left echoed the contours of the ice near them. The formation in the middle portrait strikes me as strangely banana-like, and the abstract image below gives me a sense of movement sweeping upward while curving toward the left a little.
* Withal is an old-fashioned way of saying ‘nevertheless.’ You can see how the word came to have that meaning if you substitute the longer phrase “Even with all that I’ve done so far,” for withal.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
More than canyonlands at Canyonlands National Park
On October 8th of the recently departed year we visited Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. The top scene, seen along the trail to Mesa Arch, stopped me with its flowering rubber rabbitbrush (Ericamerica nauseosa) and two eyes in stone that watched over passers-by. Elsewhere along the trail a single eye did the watching:
The conifer that had sprung from the stone Cyclops above still lived. Elsewhere,
another lived on only as a ruin, its sinuously raised arm catching my attention.
Waiting for us back at and then even on our car was a raven, Corvus corax. It reminds
me now of the one we saw on a car at another national park the previous summer.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Nice ice thrice more than twice
Differing weather forecasts yesterday called for Austin temperatures to drop down overnight to 28°, 29°, or 30°. That may have happened in some parts of Austin, but when I checked the temperature in our yard early this morning the thermometer had dropped only to 35°, and then a little later to 34°F (1°C). Experience has taught me that that’s a low enough temperature for the frostweed plants (Verbesina virginica) half a mile downhill in Great Hills Park to do their ice trick, so I dressed warmly and drove down the hill to find out. Happily, this morning turned out to be my third encounter with frostweed ice for the 2025–2026 season. That has happened in several other cold seasons, too, which let me get away with today’s rhyming title “Nice ice thrice more than twice.”
As this was now the third time this season for frostweed to do its trick, you could say the plants were getting tired, and the extruded ice ribbons all lay very close to the ground. I saw no ice scrolls a foot or more higher up, the way I had on earlier occasions. To take the top picture shown here, I hunched over and aimed down, but for almost all the quarter of a thousand photographs I came away with I lay on (or even off) my mat on the ground to get very close to the ice formations. For the large majority of those pictures I used flash so I could stop down the aperture and get good depth of field. However, toward the end of my time with the frostweed plants the sun had risen high enough that its light started coming through the nearby trees and intermittently falling on a few of the ice formations. That induced me to take some pictures by natural light alone, even if it meant accepting a broader aperture and shallower depth of field. The photograph below is one of those.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Five days after returning from Oklahoma
Five days after returning from Oklahoma, we launched off on an overnight jaunt to Lost Maples State Natural Area some three hours west of Austin. Compared to our great 2022 visit, the bigtooth maples (Acer grandidentatum) there were putting on a paltry display, though I managed to find a few isolated trees that cooperated with my color quest. Below, backlighting helped enrich the color in the leaves, even as the display remained more subtle than in the first view.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Coral honeysuckle thriving
How about an eccentric (i.e. off-center) take on a coral honeysuckle vine (Lonicera sempervirens) flowering at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center on January 15th? Click to enlarge this panoramic view substantially.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Still more “monuments” from Monument Valley
Here are still more views of geological formations we saw in Monument Valley on October 6th.
The 17-mile circuit on an unpaved road brings up one formidable formation after another.
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After I’d written yesterday’s commentary about irrelevant things put forth as reasons not to arrest criminals, a column in The Free Press made me aware that the legal system in California gives greater consideration to non-citizens, including those who are in the country illegally, than to citizens. Yes, you read that correctly. According to a legal advisory by the California Department of Justice, criminal prosecutors “[must] consider the avoidance of adverse immigration consequences in the plea negotiation process as one factor in an effort to reach a just resolution.” In other words, if a citizen and a non-citizen commit the same crime, prosecutors may have to give the non-citizen a better deal than the citizen, for example pleading to a lesser charge, to keep the non-citizen from getting deported. It reminds me of George Orwell’s famous saying in his allegorical tale Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” In this case the non-citizens are “more equal” than the citizens.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Queen butterfly on Echinacea
Yesterday we made our first visit of the new year to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. For lack of a hard freeze so far this season, and with help from regular watering, some wildflowers there were blooming in mid-January. Among the various kinds of butterflies we saw taking advantage of that was the queen (Danaus plexippus). One on the flower head of an Echinacea purpurea var. purpurea was more docile than any butterfly I’ve encountered for a long time, so I was easily able to get in close and take a bunch of pictures.
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Irrelevant things put forth as reasons not to arrest criminals
Imagine that a man who is in the country illegally has also committed a serious crime, and the police come to apprehend the criminal. Now imagine also that someone protests the arrest, saying “But he plays the trombone.” A normal response to that statement by authorities would be, “Yes, he may play the trombone, but the fact remains that he is in the country illegally and has also committed a serious crime, so we need to arrest him.”
As far as I know, no one has offered as frivolous an excuse for not arresting criminals as trombone playing, but I have heard people put forth the following irrelevant excuses.
No human is illegal.
It interferes with people’s daily routine.
He’s our neighbor.
He’s a person of color.
He has a steady job.
You’re making the community unsafe.
You’re splitting up families.
If someone from your neighborhood who’s in the country illegally had harmed
a member of your family, wouldn’t you want the police to arrest the criminal?
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Two fluffy things from Oklahoma
On November 13th last year, driving much of the way from Tulsa toward Oklahoma City along the now decommissioned but still historic U.S. Route 66, I noticed a colony of a familiar friend at its fluffy peak: the bluestem grass appropriately called bushy (Andropogon glomeratus or tenuispatheus). Late the previous afternoon as the sun sank low I’d happily stopped a little north of Tulsa to photograph a wispy cloud formation.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Cedar elms
My northwest part of Austin is home to plenty of cedar elms (Ulmus crassifolia), whose leaves turn yellow and orange in December. The trees’ branches and twigs tend to adorn themselves with little “wings” that books sometimes call “corky flanges” (which would have been a good name for a pop music group in the era of Jefferson Airplane and Strawberry Alarm Clock).
After the cedar elms in a group have dropped all their leaves toward year’s end, the now-unobstructed view
of the trees’ many scraggly branches makes for a good abstraction in the more-is-more aesthetic tradition.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Giant saguaros at Canyon Lake
Most people don’t associate giant saguaro cacti (Carnegiea gigantea) with bodies of water, but on October 22nd last year we drove out to Canyon Lake east of Phoenix and found tons (literally and figuratively) of those cacti there. In the second view, beyond (literally and figuratively) the obvious saguaro in the foreground you can make out two others on the rocky promontory at the left.
© 2026 Steven Schwartzman
Portraits of Wildflowers 