Wednesday morning I went to check on the downy rattlesnake plantain. The buds weren’t open yet. But I did find a lovely stand of lopseed (Phryma leptostachya), so I took out all the gear and had a lot of fun trying to get extreme closeups.

It was already 80ºF by 9am, humid and dead still, no breeze at all. But the plants were still shaking around. Eventually I saw ants on them. So every few pictures I would move camera and tripod over to a different plant and shoot those flowers, until the ants came back. If any of these pictures are less then perfectly clear, it’s the ants’ fault.

Macro work really requires stillness. It’s hard to do in the field.

Each flower measures about 3/8″ long.

At any rate, I wrote a very detailed post about lopseed last summer; you can read all about it there. This post is just about the pictures. Please click on them to enlarge and see the fine details.