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.
Continue reading Sand Verbena Flowers
I have been sharing a lot of photographs from this year’s spectacular wildflower bloom in Death Valley National Park — and I’m not quite done yet! In dry years one may have to go off searching (sometimes in vain) for landscape-carpeting flowers like these. But this year, after a previous season of good rainfall the flowers were easy to find.
How easy? I made this photograph just a few minutes from the busy Furnace Creek area. Here the desert gold flowers spilled across a broad wash, past small hills, and on into the more distant wide valley. Beyond are the dark hills at the north end of the Black Mountains.
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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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This photograph features two rather different Death Valley flowers. The bright yellow desert gold flowers cover gravel benches and fans after wet winter seasons. They were all over the place when we visited in late February this year. The desert five-sot is not an uncommon flower, though it isn’t seen in anything close to the numbers of the desert gold. It is also less obvious due to its smaller blossoms and darker color.
We had stopped at this location in southern Death Valley to photograph the (very obvious!) desert gold and to look for the also-plentiful sand verbena blossoms. But almost any time you stop for flowers in the park, if you look around you’ll find others besides those you came for — and here that meant we found plenty of desert five-spot flowers nearby.
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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
All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others.
Forgive me for sharing yet another photograph featuring fields of desert gold flowers, but they appeared in impressive numbers in Death Valley in late February. This is usually a dry and generally beige landscape (with some exceptions) but these flowers turned gravel fans and some hills yellow all over the valley.
The foreground flowers are obvious, but if you look carefully you’ll see more fields of the flowers further up the gentle slope leading to the base of the Black Mountains. The more distant color — yellow mixed with green — may seem subtle, but to those of us used to more typical Death Valley conditions it is striking.
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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
All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others.