Readers’ wildlife photos

Today’s plant photos come from Rik Gern of Austin, Texas. Rik’s captions and IDs are indented and, as always, you can click on the photos to enlarge them. Here are a few odds and ends from around my neighborhood for you. When it’s the leaves fill out in the Summertime the Chinaberry Tree ( Melia Azedarach ) is pretty nondescript, but in the Winter when all that’s visible are the branches and berries, it is interesting and looks like it could have been designed by Dr. Seuss . The Chinaberry Tree is an introduced species, but is quite popular in this area: The berries look like small wrinkled white grapes, but are hard as stones: Here is another picture of the full tree, this time in black and white: Another introduced species, originally from the Mediterranean, Rue ( Ruta graveolens ) is very popular with home gardeners: Goldshower ( Galphimia Glauca ) hails from neighboring Mexico, but does quite well in the region: This scrappy little plant is indigenous. It’s called a Silverleaf Nightshade ( Solanum elaeagnifolium ) due to the color of its flower, but I didn’t get to see it in bloom: Here it looks like a tomato from a tough neighborhood, but it’s apparently more closely related to the potato: The last image is a distortion of Chinaberry branches and berries. The clusters of berries made me think of the tinker-toy like models of chemical structures that you used to see in chemistry class, and that got me to thinking of DNA and all the plasticity of expression it allows for. Since this ended up with a vaguely Art Nouveau feel, I’m calling it DNA Nouveau: