I have a piece in this month’s issue of Texas Highways about bluebonnets and the @julianonderdonk Twitter feed.

The feed is an art bot created by Andrei Taraschuk, who talks more about his robots in this Ignite talk:

I don’t do a whole lot of freelance writing, so this was a fun change of pace for me. (Thanks to @michaelhoinski for the invitation.)

As with any piece of writing, sometimes it’s hard to find a place to start. In this case, when I was researching Onderdonk I realized that 1901 was both the year the bluebonnet was named the state flower and the year that the man who would eventually become famous for painting them left Texas to go study painting.

(If you’re an Antiques Roadshow fan, there are several episodes featuring Onderdonk: here’s a large painting, here’s one of his Long Island paintings, and this episode has a particularly good story by a woman who lived next door.)

You can read the article here.