Is wildness small as a wildflower or big as a hurricane?  A fierce beast or a butterfly? Is it actually both: everything and everywhere in between? Is it only out there? Out my window from the desk where I write; out there on the ragged slopes of the Cascades in the distance? Or is it in this very room where a spider has webbed over my open window, to catch mosquitos I hope? A few months ago when I was in Texas these questions began to boil in me. As an amateur botanist, the first thing I always notice about a place is the flora. Whether it is the domestic/cultivated flora of a neighborhood, the mixed flora of parks, or the flora that is off the map out their beyond man’s reach, so to speak.

When I saw this little dandelion in a parking strip lawn in Houston I knew it was different than the dandelions back in the Snoqualmie Valley, those European weeds that infiltrate every bare spot they can between the crops and the forest. It was more delicate of color and form, and it was wild. What do I mean wild? It was there, in a mown lawn. What is farther from wild than a mowed lawn? Blacktop, maybe? It was a native wildflower of Texas, Texas Dandelion (Pyrropappus multicaulis) as it were, that managed to survive the urbanization of its habitat and nestled down in among the non-native grasses and withstand mowing. Fierce I would say. But hardly noticeable from an SUV at 55 miles an hour. I was walking that day as close as I could to this tiny fierceness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Later I drove to the Houston Arboretum & Nature Center where huge efforts are being made to retain some of the wildness that was once Houston and educate the public about it. Of course much of this wildness had to be recreated, invasive trees, shrubs and perennials slashed and dug to make room. It is gardening really, a human intervention into what nature wanted to do with what it had: covering the ground with introduced species with vigor beyond that of the native plants. The arboretum had been severely damaged by Hurricane Ike back in 2008. A thousand trees were lost.  The arboretum’s opportunistic director, Joe Blanton, sees this destruction as a platform to reassess the arboretums direction and to recreate it. One of the newest plantings is a recreated meadow planted with grasses and wildflowers once native to the Houston area. I was there at a point of change, when the spring flowers were dropping back beneath the rising summer plants. This cluster of bee balm (Monarda sp.) represents what was once wild here in the open grasslands that wove between the pine and mixed oak forests.

 

I barely held still for a moment on that trip; I’ve barely held still since I my return, thus the delay in posting (a gardener’s spring is never still). I drove south from Houston to the Rio Grande Valley, in search of my past (I spent a small portion of my childhood there). I was lucky to be travelling during Texas’ legendary wildflower season. With limited time for stops I was fortunate that so many wildflowers grew along the side of the highway. What former First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson called “one of wildflowers’ last citadels”. I was hard to think of these 100 to 300 foot wide strips of wildness between racing traffic and fields plowed and sprayed to support mono-crops of corn or cotton as citadels. She was being generous, but it was not mere generosities that lead her to commend the “maintenance foremen [that] had the foresight to hold off mowing until after the plants had gone to seed the year before, and then to have spread the hay-mulch of seeds on bare spots where there were no flowers”.

During my 330-mile drive from Houston to Harlingen, my first stop in the Rio Grande Valley, I made many short stops along the side of the highway to enjoy the handiwork of these gardeners, these foresighted highway maintenance foremen. And I was richly blessed. There were flowers beyond my imagining tangled in among the weedy grasses, like this Green Milkweed (Asclepias viridis), not as showy as the Pink Evening Primrose (Oenethera speciosa) nor the Texas Paintbrush  (Castilleja indivisa) whose colors slowed me down and pulled me off the road.

 

                                                                 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The weather was strange, hot and muggy and overcast, but at the same time extremely windy. Hardly a photographer’s dream conditions, but I pulled out the camera and tripod anyway. At the pace I was travelling I had no time to wait for perfect conditions. So I bent on humble knee to the viewfinder to compose some shots.  As I squinted and forced my attention through that small hole, the wind that had merely set my hair and linen shirt to flapping, took on monstrous proportions. The flowers I tried to capture flipped back and forth from one end of the rectangular visual field to the other. All the while people raced passed at 80, 90, 100 miles an hour in their climate-controlled reality, I was observing a hurricane in miniature. What I stopped for was wildflowers; what I got was the wildness of winds.

 

 

 

 

 

As I travelled down the Gulf Coast the composition of plants changed with each little topographic lift and drop in this relatively flat landscape. As I moved toward the drier south there were great swaths of Brown-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta) and White Prickly Poppy (Argemone albiflora). Like “Chasing Wildflowers” author Scott Calhoun, “My interest is in what is lovely in the wild, and what could be lovely in gardens.” Certainly I have grown many of the annual cultivars of R. hirta with great success, the prickly poppies don’t fare so well in our soggy cool climate here in the Northwest.

 

I was hoping to find some seed of this Prairie Parsley (Polytaenia nuttallii), but that effective highway maintenance foreman had already disseminated last years crop.

As I moved closer to the Rio Grande Valley I crossed the South Texas Sand Sheet and entered a dramatic new flora that hosted several cactus and one of my favorite plants lantana.

Low Growing Prickly Pear (Opuntia macrorhiza)

 

 

Calico Flower (Lantana urticoides)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Desert Christmas Cactus (Opuntia leptocaulis)

 

 

By evening I had entered the Rio Grande Valley and set up camp at the Hampton Inn in Harlingen, my childhood hometown.  I was just a short mile from the Hugh Ramsey Nature Park on the mesquite-forested banks of Arroyo Colorado. Though it was rife with migrating birds the drought had reduced the wildflowers to the watery peripheries of the park. Though I hardly think of Mexican Hat (Ratibida columnaris) as an aquatic species it was interesting to see how closely it hung on the arroyo, where most the wildflowers were. This landscape, where not irrigated, is home mostly to shrubs and Texas Prickly Pear (Opuntia engelmannii)

 

Honey Mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa)

 

 

 

 

 

South Texas where irrigation waters for the Rio Grande make it possible to grow corn and rice and cotton in great abundance leaves little room for wildness. Accept where it infiltrates the edges, like the highway wildflowers I saw on my way south. Sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) lined many fields where they benefited from irrigation run off. I doubt their status as a wildflower, having been cultivated for millennia throughout the Americas. They seem as weedy as dandelions where I saw them and certainly reviled by anyone trying to grow a mono-crop. Even on the banks of the Rio Grande the wildness was composed of non-natives reeds and the dramatic Brazilian Tree Tobacco (Nicotiana glauca). But even there among so much weediness the occasional true native wildflower showed up.

 

 

 

 

 

I was charmed to discover this Climbing Milkweed (Funastrum cynachoides) a new species for me. The structure of the flowers of the milkweeds has intrigued since I was a small child wandering the weedy railroad tracks near my home in West Allis Wisconsin. The native Common Milkweed (Asclepia syriaca) grew in great stand and fed the Monarch Butterfly larvae that I collected and raised in Mason jars at home.

 

 

 

All the winds that had vexed my photo taking brought in great rains. And after those rains the Evening-Star Rain-Lilies (Cooperia drummondii). As I look at this photo of these delicate little flowers that forced their way out of the South Texas Sand Sheet after it was bombarded with rain, I wonder again about my questions of wildness. Does it really have a limit? Is it only a 100 to 300 foot strip of wildflowers along a Texas Highway? Or is it out my window deep in the unreachable crevices of the Cascades hiding until what we call civilization dies down?

Or is it bore on the wind, penetrating and touching everything from skyscraper to wildflower?

 

 

 

I believe as Bowie sings: “ Wild is the Wind”.