Every year, the turning seasons summon fresh colors from the native grasslands and prairies of Texas. The showy buds of spring—bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush—are the most famous. But the state’s prairies provide blooms year-round, in colors both overwhelmingly vast and intimately lovely.

These blooms are the charismatic stars of the native prairie, says photographer Sean Fitzgerald. “There is a flow of wildflowers through the year that’s a gentle progression of colors, shapes, and textures,” he says. There’s the spring flowering of blues, reds, and purples, and the rich butter and golden yellows of summer plants—including various shades of green in the grasses. Smaller, subtler flowers emerge in winter.

For years, Fitzgerald has crossed the state documenting its diversity of flowering plants and their connections to the landscape. Last May, he got down on his stomach to photograph box turtles trundling beneath stiff greenthread wildflowers in Colorado City and bison grazing on the blooms at Caprock Canyon. In August 2022, he captured carpenter bees humming on prairie blazing star in Deer Park Prairie, owned by the Native Prairies Association of Texas. And in October 2022, he shot Maximilian sunflowers against the impressionistic backdrop of a controlled burn at the Clymer Meadow Preserve in Greenville.

Less than 1% of Texas’ original grasslands and prairies remain intact, so Fitzgerald hunted out the remnants of the ecosystems protected in out-of-the-way public spaces, conservation easements, and private land. He found Spanish gold wildflowers near the Trinity River Audubon Center in Dallas. And in the patches among the forests of Ray Roberts Lake State Park, scraps of original prairie unfolded before his camera.

While Fitzgerald sometimes catches macro images of micro blooms full of anatomical beauty, he mostly seeks to place flowers in the context of the world around them—framing blooms against animals, the sky, or buildings so that they anchor the image without necessarily dominating it. “The story is the broader environment, which is why I’ll shoot really close to something with a wide lens,” he says. “The flower is prominent, but you see where it lives. You can’t just view wild subjects in isolation, or you’ll think they’re all fine.”

For Fitzgerald, photographing the state’s blooms has led him to a deeper appreciation of the landscape itself and helped him cultivate a greater sense of patience. “So many times I’ll sit in one place in a prairie and realize I can spot 15 to 20 different wildflower species,” Fitzgerald says. Wait long enough, he finds, and the tangled meadows will reveal their secrets. —Asher Elbein

Photographs by Sean Fitzgerald