Essays

Moseying: Exploring the Natural World

The glories of wildflowers bring tears of joyful thankfulness
April 18, 2007

Springtime makes me delirious! Wildflowers make me ecstatically ebullient. During the winter and during the hot dry summers the landscape is subdued but when wet winters bless the Llano Estacado there is no more beautiful landscape in the world. I know – I know – that is hyperbole. It is not really hyperbole, however, because what makes it the most beautiful landscape in the world is the contrast between the seasons. It is more beautiful because of the drabness of the other seasons.

The wildflowers were not affected by 2007’s Easter snowstorm. Check out the photoessay in the xeriscape section’s “Gone Native Photodiary” that is labeled Easter Snowstorm 2007. Wildflowers have an amazing ability to shrug off the effects of cold. The earth itself keeps them warm, or so it seems. Or maybe wildflowers have antifreeze in their cellular tissue! Whatever the answer is, it is magical and wondrous.

On the gently rolling plains of the Llano Estacado rangeland, a person can often see several square miles at a time, and when that amount of area is covered with a multi-colored blanket of wildflowers a person becomes awed. A quick mental calculation provides the estimation that one can see 5 billion flowers at one glance. In the span of a twenty-mile drive a person can see a hundred billion flowers. (10 flowers per square foot (a low figure) times 43,560 square feet per acre equal nearly a half-million flowers per acre.)

The names of wildflowers deserve to be CAPITALIZED in honor of their glory. (Conventional newspaper punctuation does not agree!) The season begins in mid-March with the creamy yellow fields of Bladderpod that often stretch for dozens of miles. Lavender Prairie Verbena provides contrast to the Bladderpod at that time. After two weeks, the darker yellow of Husiache Daisies replace the Bladderpod.

For the first 30 miles north of Midland during the week of April 10th the fields of Huisache Daisy were interspersed with acre-sized patches of bluish-purple Tansy Aster, dark pools of purple Phacelia, and the tall white spires of Spectacle Pod. Dotted among the fields were also dots of bright orange Globe Mallow, mists of white to pink Kisses (Gaura), a haze of lavender Vervain, carpets of yellow and pink West Texas Paintbrush, and spikes of blue Fendler’s Penstemon. I identified over 50 species of wildflowers in that stretch of road.

During the final half of April other flowers will come into bloom. Golden Wave and Indian Blanket will replace the Huisache Daisy. Splotches of Pink Sand Penstemon and white and yellow Evening Primroses will speckle the landscape. Playas and draw bottoms will be filled with first the light blue clouds of Blue Flax and then constellations of American Basketflower and Purple Thistle, interspersed with pools of dark purple Horsemint. In one day of moseying along the roads of West Texas on May 1st, a person can see 200 species of wildflowers in Midland County alone, and over 300 species if a person drives over to Robert Lee, down to San Angelo and west to Iraan and back to Midland.

The glorious show slowly moves north. On April 10th, the fields of wildflowers only reached Seminole to the northwest and only to Lamesa to the north and Snyder to the northeast. To the southeast the western Hill Country and to the south the Stockton Plateau were also vibrant (according to recent visitors to the Sibley Nature Center.) The sanddunes to the west were full of flowers, too. It will not be until May before the breaks of the Caprock east of Lubbock and Amarillo come into full flower. Amarillo often reaches its peak wildflower season in the second and third weeks of May.

This spring I have spoken with many visitors to the Sibley Nature Center about wildflowers. Their knowledge base about the wildflowers varies from those that have almost no knowledge to those that are so knowledgeable that they know when they have discovered species that we have not yet recorded on the Midland County wildflower checklist or have in the Midland County Herbarium in the Sibley Nature Center Collections Room and Library.
Zoe Merriman Kirkpatrick’s “Wildflowers of the Southern Great Plains” is the best book to buy to begin to learn the wildflowers of the region. If you happen upon a copy of Barton Warnock’s out-of-print “Wildflowers of the Guadalupe Mountains and Sanddune Region” buy it, for it is the second best regional identification book. The "wired" generation with laptop and cellphone modem can utilize our website’s habitat section, along with the Botanical Research Institute of Texas “online flora of NorthCentral Texas” and Texas A&M’s “Vascular Plant Image Gallery.”

A great way to learn wildflowers is to go out and pick a bouquet of your favorites and then bring them to us to be identified. We will introduce you to our herbarium, which you can revisit frequently to verify your future identifications. An even better way is to use a digital camera and take photographs and email them to us (one at a time) or to bring us a flashdrive or CD of your images for us to identify.

We are Llaneros, residents of the Llano Estacado. The wildflowers of the region are one of the many things that we share in common. We become closer as a community when the knowledge of their names and their stories becomes another thing that we share in common. The Sibley Nature Center believes that all Llaneros should know the names and stories of the most common wildflowers. We believe it is an essential element of our education as citizens of the region – we are dedicated to promoting the idea that such bioregional knowledge becomes part of what is imparted by the elementary schools of the region. Until that day, however, we will continue to do our utmost to be the most comprehensive source of ecological and historical information for the region.

My o’ my! Oh my gosh! Golly gee whillikers! Holy mackerel! Oh, yes, indeedy, the fields of the Llano Estacado are glorious. So glorious, so wonderful, so beautiful, so psychedelic that the landscape seems to be a delirious hallucination! The beauty we see is an incredible blessing that has been bestowed on us. Wildflowers are divine gifts of God – they shout out that God is great and that God loves us. To be given the beauty of wildflowers should humble us and bring us to our knees in thankfulness.