Tag: Ozark wildflowers

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.

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.

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“.

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.

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.