This photograph is a bit of an exercise in changing my perspective. If you were in Death Valley or other places where sand verbena grows and blooms, you might first notice a pinkish-purple color out on a gravel slope somewhere. Getting closer you would see large, sprawling individual plants with large pink-purple “flowers.” But a closer look reveals that these are actually globular clusters of many small flowers.
Obviously, the photograph takes that third and closest view. We went looking for these flowers in a Death Valley location where I have found them in the past, and we were not disappointed. While this is a dry year in California overall, there was quite a bit of rain in the desert early in the season, and this set off a pretty good wildflower bloom — enough that, indeed, the color of bunches of sand verbena was visible at a distance.
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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email
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