Favoritos de tshahan

Field Notes - Black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta) in a sloped, north facing field.
These specific flowers are superb specimens showing fasciation possibly caused by an imbalance in hormones or perhaps a fungus.

My friends, this isn't something you see everyday...I think I slipped into flower nirvana when I saw this.

Fasciated Canada lily, over 50 flowers on a single stalk; single plant in weedy moist thicket along railroad.

There were several plants presenting fasciation. Field.
Wikipedia:
Fasciation (pronounced /ˌfæʃiˈeɪʃən/, from the Latin root meaning "band" or "stripe"), also known as cresting, is a relatively rare condition of abnormal growth in vascular plants in which the apical meristem (growing tip), which normally is concentrated around a single point and produces approximately cylindrical tissue, instead becomes elongated perpendicularly to the direction of growth, thus producing flattened, ribbon-like, crested (or "cristate"), or elaborately contorted tissue.[1] Fasciation may also cause plant parts to increase in weight and volume in some instances.[2] The phenomenon may occur in the stem, root, fruit, or flower head.

Some plants are grown and prized aesthetically for their development of fasciation.[3] Any occurrence of fasciation has several possible causes, including hormonal, genetic, bacterial, fungal, viral and environmental causes.

Achlorophyllous plant on right.

Green sprig is Mitchella repens, I think: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/20384470.

I'm guessing fungus is Ramaria concolor (stricta): https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/20372396.

"The Art of Mother Nature".

These images represent the brief but beautiful display we get on the first hard freeze of a winter--if we get such a morning at all at our latitude. We've had a few cold mornings just below freezing in Austin over the past few weeks, but this Arctic blast was enough to keep the temperature in the teens and 20's for several hours. The result for Frostweed is frozen sap which splits the base of the stem and comes curling out in fantasticly beautiful "shaved ice" forms. Botanical icicles. The shapes are as diverse as snowflakes.

The male Rufous Hummingbird has spectacular, iridescent feathers. I just learned that a 2020 study in Evolution "shows that while hummingbird feathers have the same basic makeup as other birds', the special shape of their pigment-containing structures enables them to reflect a rainbow of light." These two photos were taken about 20 seconds apart.