Don’t be mistaken that this is a guide to the wildflowers of Wisconsin, though I am posting some pictures of wildflowers, and those savage weeds that act like wildflowers. This is just a post of flowers I have seen during my two week trip there. This very patriotic planting — I was traveling during the Fourth of July—was at my favorite new nursery: The Flower Factory. Just south of Madison, Wisconsin, set in the lovely rolling hilly farmlands of that part of the state, it came as quite a surprise. I told my sisters I wouldn’t be buying any plants, but couldn’t resist and brought back seven. One was this lovely delphinium, a wild Russian seedling collected by the owner. It is brilliant blue sturdy and long-lived… who could ask more of a delphinium?

 

       I also brought back a piece of the is white giant bellflower (Campanula latifolia) which grew in the wild gardens at the Flower Factory.

 

 

This beautiful unidentified blue clematis…..

 

 

 

…. grew in profusion at one of my other favorite stops in Madison: Olbrich Botanical Gardens.

 

 

 

 

 

The gardeners at Olbrich are quite wonderful colorists…

 

 

… I never fail to be pleased by what I see there.

 

 

 

I drove north to my mother’s farm a few days later and made a stop in Randolph, the home of Jung’s Seed, and, also, McClure and Zimmerman and  Roots and Rhizomes  . I have been ordering from this place for years and wanted to see their display garden. The woman I talked to on the phone wasn’t very encouraging when I asked about it, but it was on the way. I also don’t encourage you to visit Randolph and the gardens at Jung Seed Genetics, a bit disappointing, but now I know.

 

 

 

Twenty-two years ago my friend Robert Miller died. I had not visited his grave in nearly twenty years and found my way back to this humble country cemetery in the far north lake country of the state. One of his many favorite flowers was miniature red carnations. He bought a bouquet every week for many years and put it on the end table next to his easy chair . I wanted to bring red carnations to his grave, but the family grocery store in Phillips only had these Independence Day bouquets, which fortunately included miniature red carnations.  Robert was very patriotic  so I know he would have appreciated this little bit holiday decoration on his grave stone. I wish the mosquitoes hadn’t been so bad;  I would have lingered longer in Church Hill Cemetery.

 

 

 

The ultimate goal of my trip was my mother’s forty acre farm. It is a mere four miles over the border in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. My mother whispered— here nearest neighbor is a quarter of a mile away— that she always thought of herself as living in Wisconsin, after all the U. P. was taken from the Wisconsin Territory and given to Michigan back in the 19th Century. Detroit is 525 miles away, and Milwaukee only 255. As your drive through the Land o’ Lakes district of Northern Wisconsin, you would hardly notice you passed into Michigan if it wasn’t for the large blue sign announcing “Pure Michigan”.

I have not been to the U.P. in June for so many years I can hardly remember. It is one of the most beautiful times of year in the Great Lakes Basin. Fresh, lush and floriferous. Of course, the prairie-like hay fields around my mother’s farm are smothered with ox-eye daisy, the fields themselves I doubt host any native plants: alfalfa, red clover and timothy, the preferred hay plants, are all of European origin.

 

 

 

 

 

The beautiful roadsides,too, boast primarily non-native plants. My mother is so proud of her huge swatches of lupines, and decries the road crews that spray them each year, even though there seems to be ever more  lupines each year.

 

 

Even the most remote roadside meadows far from farms or town are solely composed of non-native grasses and forbs. Here field scabiosa ( Knautia arvensis) nestles in with the daisies and trefoil (Lotus corniculatus). Pretty as can be if you are not concerned about conserving native habitat.

 

 

 

Along the banks of Lake Ottawa, and undeveloped lake in the National Forest, where my family has fished for decades, you can see more of what the native flora is like.  This sweet little sedge hugged the shore just feet from the mowed lawn of blue grass, dandelions and violets at the boat launch.

 

 

This part of the country is very cold, so the inhabitants, after a winter that can last from early November to early May, are happy for any flower that blooms. The European invaders are their wildflowers. And when that is not enough they spend those long flowerless winters crafting flowers out of discarded cans and tractor parts. Flowers are powerful, not just beautiful. Flowers are the  precursors to fruit and another year of survival to those who forage for berries, fish and hunt to supplement their rather meager incomes in this very financially depressed part of the country.

 

 

 

 

 

 

But even in town a few native plants sneak in. In this parking lot in Crystal Falls outside my cousin’s sausage shop, Sommer’s Sausage, the common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) grows; I’m not sure if it is out of appreciation or laziness that it’s there, but I appreciated it.

 

 

 

I always make the half-mile walk down the road from my mother’s to Laurel Lake, when I’m at the farm. It is one of the few purely natural and native environments I know around there. As kids we were always forbidden to venture near it. It is a true bog and it’s flora floats on huge matts of yards-deep sphagnum moss. It is now an officially protected site, thought it was always protected by it’s scary reputation of having swallowed up a team of horses, a wagon and the logger back in the forties. I wonder if they are preserved in the acidic mass below me every time I walk that spongey floating environment looking for rare botanical treats. I was lucky this time the orchids were in bloom. Above is tuberous grass pink ( Calopogon tuberoses)—neither a pink nor a grass.

 

 

 

 

Snake-mouth orchids ( Pogonia ophioglossoides) were also in bloom.

 

 

 

 

As were the pitcher plants ( Sarracenia purpurea), a least the ones on the thin floating mats of moss close to the open water, where                          the deer couldn’t eat them.

 

 

 

Still the flowers that mean the most are those in my mother’s garden. The woman who taught me how to weed is now eighty-five and not much of a weeder, so her flower beads are beginning to look like the hay fields. I wonder if in some distant future this clustered bellflower ( Campanula glomerata) will have crawled it’s way through the rough grasses out to the roadside and taken it’s place among the many other European plants that are now the roadside wildflowers.

 

 

 

I wonder too if these Johnny-jump-ups, which seem to follow my mother around and seed into every little naked nook of the farm will also venture farther, become part of this complex flora of foreign aggressors and seemingly timorous natives, clinging to the edges, where no other plants want to go. No matter, they will all be Wisconsin flowers in my mind.