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Four posts back you saw a fresh colony of Gaillardia pulchella, known as firewheels or Indian blankets; then came a closeup of a single flower head. Next you saw two views of the following stage, as the plants were losing their colorful rays and turning into globe-shaped seed heads. Now here’s the next stage, in which the globes have shed their seeds and are drying out. That hasn’t happened yet in 2012, but rather than waiting I decided to use a picture from June 28, 2011, that conveniently shows the same location on Bull Creek Dr. depicted here four posts ago. What appealed to me when I took this photograph last year was the way the morning sun provided a halo of backlighting around all the dried-out globes in the colony.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman