RANDY MACK BISHOP/DMN
Texas bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush color the roads of Central and East Texas in spring.
For years, Texas boasted about all the brash things: its bigness, battles and bodacious super-rich. It took a former first lady to remind us to brag about a gentler treasure: the wildflowers that pop up each year in desert, forest, field and right-of-way.
This spring, the display may not dazzle in the way that made a younger Lady Bird Johnson reach for her sun hat and walking shoes. "There are many delicious surprises that come when we are rich with rain," she wrote in a foreword to Texas Wildflowers: A Field Guide by pioneering conservationists Campbell and Lynn Loughmiller in 1984.And that's the rub. With so little fall and winter precipitation this year, even experts at her beloved Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in southwest Austin don't know what to expect. Ecologist Mark Simmons says the spring display may be "a blank slate" or "a bucketload of species we don't often see."
Because of dry conditions, he says, many wildflowers and grasses have been unable to germinate and grow. "This leaves a window open for other species that normally compete for limited space and soil nutrients," he says. "But, honestly, we don't know which ones will ultimately win."
One thing is sure, he says. "Spring rain is essential. No water equals no flowers. Fall and spring rains are essential for some wildflowers, such as bluebonnets." And, of course, bluebonnets are a prime tourist draw in Central Texas.
But if the heartland is running 10 inches below expected rainfall, Texas Parks & Wildlife Department botanist and plant ecologist Jason Singhurst reports that East Texas, where he works, has been catching up on rain. Early blooms of violets, day lilies, phlox and even Indian paintbrush already have appeared, he says.
Central Texas may be the wildflower epicenter for tourists, but flowering native plants spangle the entire state. They range from the Big Bend to the Big Thicket, from the Panhandle to Padre Island. "Absolutely," says Mr. Singhurst, who grew up in Plano and watched bluebonnets bloom along LBJ Freeway to the south. In fact, he says, wildflowers can be found everywhere in the state's 11 plant ecosystems, from El Paso with its average 5 to 6 inches of rainfall to Beaumont, which gets 60-plus.
One place where visitors are guaranteed wildflower sightings this year is the Johnson center, where bluebonnets, Indian paintbrush, wine cups, blackfoot daisy, Drummond phlox and giant spiderwort begin blooming in this month. Photographers are welcome and, according to communications director Saralee Tiede, it's a good place to shoot the posies without trampling other blooms.
Another surefire site for shutterbugs is Wildseed Farms, seven miles east of Fredericksburg, where proprietors John and Marilyn Thomas make their own rain. The Wildflower Celebration, with spectacular displays of bluebonnets, red corn poppies and phlox, runs daily April 3-23, but The Meadows at Wildseed Farm, with its walking trails, trial plots, display gardens and Butterfly Haus, opens March 25. And for weary petal peepers, there's even a refreshing BrewBonnet Biergarten.
Jane Sumner is a freelance writer in Richardson.
Each year, the Texas Department of Transportation, the nation's biggest wildflower gardener, buys and sows 5.6 billion seeds (33,000 pounds) of 30 different varieties along state highways.
The majestic yucca (above), with its creamy white candles, and the Pronuba moth have such a symbiotic relationship that one can't exist without the other. The female moth, which visits no other plant, lays her eggs inside the yucca and in doing so, pollinates it.
Drummond phlox were named for a Scottish botanist who discovered its bright red blooms growing along the Brazos River six years before the battle of the Alamo.
Lady Bird Johnson was 70 and actress Helen Hayes, now deceased, was 81 when the two friends co-founded the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in 1982.
In 1901, the Lupinus subcarnosus species of bluebonnet beat out the cotton boll and prickly pear blossom as the official state flower. Seventy years later, the Legislature again voted, extending that honor to the showier Texas bluebonnet and "any other Bluebonnet not heretofore recorded."
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