Tag: Ozark wildflowers

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GKP Writing News

Completing Botany Pages

Completing botany pages for my Dent County Flora is challenging. You might ask: how hard could it be to take a picture of a flower and write a sentence about it?

That would be easy. That is not what I am doing.

One case in point would be the Wild Pink or Wherry’s Pink, Silene caroliniana. This is a lovely little spring ephemeral flower in vivid pink.

wild pinks for completing botany pages
At just over an inch across, the main way of seeing these little flowers is the vivid color, obviously the source of the common name. Wherry’s Wild Pinks bloom for only a week or two and each plant has many flowers on it.

The first step is to get pictures of the flower and plant. That assumes I’ve found the plant. I take a series of pictures including the plant, flower, side of the flower, the leaf, the stem and the fruit or seed pod.

Wherry’s Pink grows along one of my hills. I admire it every spring and take pictures of it every spring.

I sat down and began completing botany pages. There were the plant, flower, side of flower, leaf, stem pictures. And no seed pod.

A spring ephemeral plant grows quickly, blooms, sets seed and disappears. I’ve been trying to get that seed pod picture for two years now.

Last year I put up a marking flag by a group of plants. When I went back, other plants had grown over the remains of the Pinks. I couldn’t find them.

This year I found some other plants in a more open area. Lots of plants don’t like growing in the gravelly areas of the hill.

seed pos for Wherry's Wild Pinks
Like the plants, the Wherry’s Wild Pink seed pods are small, an inch or so long. As soon as these are formed, the plants start going dormant until the next year. Only luck and persistence gets a picture of these.

I went back and began to search. It is amazing how a plant can seem to disappear overnight. But I did find a couple with seed pods on them.

Now I can continue completing botany pages for Wherry’s Pinks. And for the wild peach trees as I went out to take pictures of the leaves. How I forgot to take a leaf picture, I don’t know, but I found I did last winter. Peaches are deciduous.

Once I have the pictures, choosing the ones to use, cropping, resizing and setting up the page can take an hour or more.

Maybe I should go back to writing my novel. That takes less time for each page.

I’ve walked the same hills for almost thirty years now. You would think this would get boring, but it doesn’t. Every week is different from the week before. There are always new things to see.

“My Ozark Home” was done on the twenty-fifth anniversay of my time here. It contains many of the things I saw over that time.

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Latest From High Reaches

Racing the Brushcutter

Roadsides are great places to find wildflowers to photograph. Many of these flowers are only found there. My problem is racing the brushcutter.

My county, and I’m sure it’s not alone in this, firmly believes roadsides should be like well-kept lawns. Wildflowers are not welcome.

Back in the 1960s there was an attempt to change this mindset by Lady Bird Johnson, the wife of President Lyndon Johnson. She promoted planting native wildflowers along the roads and had some success at the time.

Roadsides are the new prairies. Native wildflowers are killed off for grazing land, farm land and lawns everywhere else. Roadsides offer perfect conditions for many of these plants.

coreposis racing the brushcutter
Sunny yellow flowers of coreopsis dance along the roads until the brushcutter comes along. These are annuals and must set seed to grace the roadsides next year. Many wildflowers are annuals. After a few years, they disappear as they never get a chance to set seed.

Most plants do tend to get scraggly by the end of the growing season leaving behind clusters of brown stems. Cutting these down would be fine. The plants have bloomed and seeded by then.

Spring and summer are terrible times to mow these plants down. Many never recover. Many of those that do are ones most unwelcome such as poison ivy and sericea lespedeza.

I do a lot of walking along the roads near my house and check others on the drives to and from town. The other day one of these roads had the edge cut down to lawn height.

Panic.

I do know the brushcutter in passing. He and the road crew think I’m a bit crazy. Still, I stopped and marked a unique plant so he wouldn’t cut it down.

How do I mark all the plants I’m interested in? He would have to skip the whole road and won’t do that.

So, I am racing the brushcutter. Everyday I can I will be out walking the roads, stopping at all the areas with interesting plants, trying to get pictures before they are gone.

dogbance is racing the brushcutter and losing
Dogbane is a perennial. It will regrow next year. But this year’s flowers will be gone a will any seeds. Many perennials like milkweeds put up a single stalk each year. If it is cut, that year’s bloom is gone. And the pollinators like bees are left to starve as they can not live on grass.

Once he has gone by, all the lovely flowers will be gone. Oxeye daisies. Coreopsis. Sweet clovers (I photographed this the day before mowing.). Deptford pinks. The milkweeds, elderberry, daylilies, rose gentians getting ready to bloom. So many more.

After my wildflowers are gone, I will go back to walking the hills. Walking the roads is too sad.

Yellow sunflower type wildflowers are among the casualties. Read more about them in “Exploring the Ozark Hills“.

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Latest From High Reaches

Irises Are Blooming

Flower gardens are so pretty, but I don’t have time to do much. One solution is to put in perennials, so my irises are blooming.

Here in the Ozarks, irises have been a popular flower for decades or longer. Lots of them in a wide variety of colors got planted. Like flowers do, these set seeds.

The result is wild irises. Usually these are near some old home site or along roads.

In the guidebooks irises are listed under blue. Wild irises around here are usually pale yellow and smaller than the garden grown ones.

My irises are blooming in mostly blues and purples. Some are yellow. One is white. A friend was separating her irises and passed on the rhizomes to me, so the colors are whatever came. It doesn’t matter as all of them are lovely.

irises are blooming in the Ozarks
My irises are blooming. There is a patch of lovely lavender in one spot. A patch of white stands tall in the flower section of my garden. Yellow is starting to show. Along the road wild irises are blooming here and there. These are often not as big and partially hidden by the grass.

The hummingbirds visit the flowers several times a day. Perhaps they find a meal. Perhaps they pollinate the flowers. Later the flowers will leave behind a few seed pods.

So far, the daffodils, the surprise lilies and the day lilies are happily spreading around the yard and into the woods. Interestingly, the orange day lilies never set seeds, yet still spread all over along the roads. My yard day lilies were dug up by the road grader one year. Their patch has doubled in size in spite of being mowed both by the mower and by the deer.

Although wild irises could be considered an invasive species, they, like the daffodils and ox eye daisies, are here to stay. Therefore, I will stop along the road while the irises are blooming to complete the set of pictures of irises for my botany project.

After the irises are done blooming, the blackberry lilies will open. Like the irises and the daffodils, these escaped from home gardens probably a century ago. We are a country of immigrants.

“Exploring the Ozark Hills” has several Ozark wildflowers among its essays.