Essays

Moseying: Exploring the Natural World

Spring Wildflowers and ethnobotany
April 28, 2004

GET IN YOUR CAR AND DRIVE!!! Go look at the glorious wildflowers along the highways of west and central Texas!!! Go!!! Deborah and I have recently driven 1500 miles, visiting sites from Fredericksburg to El Paso. We counted almost 200 species in bloom, and saw hundreds of 100-acre fields of yellow, white, blue, and red.

The very best fields we have seen are reasonably close to Midland. Go out towards Gardendale 14 miles and turn north on 1788. Fifteen miles north of the junction you will pass fields of Western Wallflower. I have never seen more than a few hundred at the site, but this year there are millions. Each is a 3 foot tall spike of golden yellow huisache daisy mixed with red Indian blankets. Go to the junction of the highway from Andrews to Big Spring (Highway 87) and turn east. There are incredible golden fields for the first 10 miles. Or, keep going west past Gardendale, Goldsmith, and Notrees, and down in the sanddunes before Kermit, where there are the most incredible fields of the white flowers of sand abronia. As with the wallflower, there are more than I have ever seen in 40 years of wildflower watching.

Rain has been falling over Texas, and when the rain falls, “the Good Lord gives us glorious wonders in which to delight,” as a minister said in a civic group meeting where I was giving a wildflower program. I agree, and believe we should honor those gifts by going and admiring them, inhaling the sweet aromas, caressing the soft petals, and giving thanks for their presence. Yes! But you have to HURRY! Unless we get more rain in the next week, the fields will be turning brown by May 7th!

Buy a wildflower identification book! There are at least a dozen books on Texas Wildflowers – make sure the book you buy is of the flowers of Texas. Several regions of Texas have identification books just for that area. Take a camera – and take lots of pictures, then mount them in an album and put their names under the pictures after you identify them. If you have trouble with identifications, come to Sibley and we will help!!! We should all know the names of our most common species of wildflowers, and know some of their stories, too. (There are several books on the legends and lore of Texas wildflowers, and almost every identification book will comment on medicinal, ornamental, or material uses of the plants.)

Learning the names and stories of the wildflowers is a patriotic act. That statement sounds weird, doesn’t it? Let me explain… patriotism is love of country, right? Country not only means the political institutions, it also means the land. Loving the land means having knowledge of what is on the land – how can you love anything or anyone without knowing all that you can about what or who it is that you love? Knowledge is part of the process of learning to love. The beauty of the flowers does stimulate deep emotion – “Oooh, it is so pretty, it fills me with giddiness, I love it, I love it.” Admiration is just the beginning of love, though, or so I believe.

When you know the names of the plants, you will greet them forever as friends in the future. “Oh my word – look, here is Scrambled Eggs, Toadflax, Firewheel, and Paintbrush – it is so good to see you again, sweet flowers – and I know you, I know your names, oh yes, I know you!” And if you know the stories of the plants, you are participating in perpetuating culture, including cultures not of your heritage.

Let me show you what I mean – let’s take Yucca, for example. When you see the big yuccas with their 6 foot spikes of glowing white blossoms on a hillside in the evening light, they glow with an internal incandescence. Some folks call them Spanish Bayonets. Somehow rooted in our collective memory is an image of the Spanish explorers of Texas of the 1500’s and 1600’s, weaving their way through a scene filled with the yuccas, riding their stallions, wearing armor, flags and banners waving. Yucca is also known as soapweed, and that story goes back thousands of years, to whenever an Indian first discovered that a person could cut up the roots of any of the species of yucca and swirl them in water which results in suds foaming up, perfect for washing bodies and utensils. Some people call it basketgrass, too, for the Indians took the leaves of any of the species, dry them, and then pound them until they are shredded, and the resulting twine can be woven into ropes, sandals, hats, sleeping mats and more. And for an epicurean delight, harvest the flowers – they taste like a sweet cauliflower and are great in salads or dipped in batter and fried into fritters.

How about pepperweed – do you know the story of that little innocuous plant? It is just six inches tall, the blooms are tiny and off white, while the seeds are flat wafers. Just a weed, right? In the Great Depression, many people did not have jobs, and farmers were suffering in a drought. Good green vegetables and fruit were hard to buy, and if you do not eat vegetables and fruit you get scurvy. Scurvy starts out with the symptom of general exhaustion, then big splotchy spots form on your skin, and in bad cases teeth loosen and fall out. My grandmother told me that in the 1890’s she was sent out into the field to pick greens in the spring and was specifically told to make sure she had pepperweed. When you nibble on peppergrass your mouth will start to tingle, sort of like a mild pepper, or the sensation a person gets from horseradish or hot mustard. She taught my father to do it in the Depression, and every spring both would go looking for pepperweed, just to nibble on it again, and to tell the story. They told the story every year, as I do, to every school child that visits the Sibley Nature Center. Thousands of kids have nibbled on the plant here at Sibley!

And do you know puccoon? No? It is 8 inches tall, with yellow tubular flowers with a crinkled edge to its petals – just a little mound that blooms in April. But – if you dig up a plant and get all of its root, then chop up the root into fine pieces, and place that in water, soon you will have a beautiful purple dye. Southwestern décor is popular, so if you have purple in your Navajo blanket, that is from where it comes. When you are in New Mexico and buying a blanket, ask the seller of the blanket if the dyes are plant-based. Many of the traditional weavers take great pride in making their own dyes.

Puccoon also has a great story that illustrates a biological process – that of cleistogamy. Those yellow flowers are sterile. The perennial plants bloom even in drought years, and in drought years there might not be enough insects to pollinate it. As a result, later in the year, small green blossoms form hidden in the leaves, and never open. These nondescript blooms self-pollinate, insuring another year’s crop of seed. To me, that “biological story” is also a “spiritual story.” Is it not totally amazing, incredible, and wonderful that the plant has that ability? It can be a story of “adaptive evolution” or it can be a story of “what a wonderful creation!” Whether you believe one story or the other (or both), cleistogamy is “magical,” for the process seems beyond the scope of human creative imagination and fills me with awe.

The multi-level aspect of the knowledge of plants is basic to the creation of shared culture. You better watch out – if you get in your car and drive to look at a wildflower, you may never be the same!