Spring officially makes its entry this week, but the Texas wildflower scene is way ahead of the game this year.
If you get the chance in the next three weeks, hit the highways and be prepared for quite the show that bluebonnets have in store for you.
KXAN, an Austin NBCTV affiliate, reports on its website that the bluebonnets are “courtesy of the Texas Department of Transportation’s wildflower program, which is a state-level initiative to cultivate more than 5,000 native wildflower species along state roadways.”
Formed in 1917, the highway department hired a landscape artist in the 1930s to look after things and make sure our wildflowers had free range, so to speak.
Bluebonnets are not the only flowers to carpet the Hill Country. Indian paintbrush and Indian blanket will get going pretty soon, too, and the contrast between them and their azure counterpart is breathtaking.
A reminder is in order if you choose to leave the car while taking photos: these are annual flowers. If too many get trampled, they will die and not go to seed. We can’t have that, Texans.
Honestly, this week I wanted to launch into a warning about the Chinese marijuana mafia in our country or the fact that a Eastern European autocrat is visiting and being celebrated by one of the guys running for President of the United States, but alas, doing so would have given me another kind of blues.
Thank goodness I opted to write about Lady Bird Johnson’s bluebonnets instead.
“Myheartfounditshome long ago in the beauty, mystery, order, and disorder of the flowering earth,” the former First Lady from Texas said. “My special cause, the one that alerts my interest and quickens the pace of my life, is to preserve the wildflowers and native plants that define the regions of our land and to encourage and promote their use in appropriate areas and thus help pass on to generations in waiting the quiet joys and satisfactions I have known since my childhood.”
Spoken like a real Hill Country lady who, were she living today, might caution us to be careful of walking in the bluebonnets as well as the weeds of politics.
Poisonoussnakescanbe found in both places.
Snyder, Texas, native Sue Jane Sullivan is a retired schoolteacher whose thought-provoking commentary appears occasionally in several West Texas newspapers, including The Texas Spur and The Caprock Courier.
