APRIL 17, 2004

Flower power

If the wildflowers around here ever took a spring off, the chances of a Texan failing to notice the season altogether would be fair to good. It's natural to enjoy watching pasture land dive into rich, dark greens and listening sounds of songbirds fill the air after our local winter's vague indecision, but it is the coming of the deep blue-violet and white-tipped bluebonnets, the scarlet Indian paintbrush and the dozens of bright wildflower species that follow them that offer the grandest gesture you'll find in this climate, and an eye-popping one at that.

Our area is largely sustained by ranching – the soil is too dry and nutrient-poor to sustain large-scale, chemistry-set agriculture, so most of the land is used to grow grass, which is then used to grow cattle. This is just the sort of land our grassland wildflowers prefer. Around here, the three-month display opens with the bright, flickering purple of low-growing wine cups and the powerful blues and reds of the bluebonnet and Indian paintbrush. It scatters out from there into the pink-blushed white of the evening primrose and a dozen species whose burning colors lead us into summer – the oranges, yellows and blacks of Indian blankets, Mexican hats, black-eyed Susans and many other familiar flowers whose names I will probably never know.

But it's that first stage that's the kicker. The bluebonnet, Texas' state flower, and the Indian paintbrush both come bursting from the earth in huge curtains of color with a brightness that seems distorted, unreal. Perhaps this is because the grass, nursed by the winter rains and emboldened by the climbing temperatures, offers the perfect contrast. Or perhaps it's because the landscape here edges toward the pairie's hardness, rocky, tough-skinned and brown-gray much of the year, with the huge blue sky only reminding us how dry it is down here. For whatever reason, the combined physical and psychological effect is one of unadulterated richness, like sacks of exotic and costly cochineal and lapis dust might have seemed to a medieval painter's apprentice before they were blended to make paints. That such a great source of warmth in the world can rise up from the ground without warning is a wonder that is both obvious and fundamental. In nature, there is no such thing as poor taste.

Which makes it seem natural, even primal, that locals are so passionate about the wildflower season that more or less dominates the regional tableau from March through early May. To aid the flowers' natural proclivities, volunteers spread an annual 33,000 pounds of wildflower seeds along highway medians and shoulders throughout the state. Many counties whose marketing efforts to tourists are largely produce-themed (the Cameron Dewberry Festival, the many unofficial watermelon capitals of Texas) band together to promote circuitous "wildflower trails" to lure the millions of Texans who do in fact go on country drives just to look at the wildflowers. Public schoolchildren sing tirelessly about bluebonnets and can repeat the Comanche myth of their creation. To better serve the mobs of wildflower fans throughout the state, the state's Department of Transportation staffs a wildflower hotline to keep track of hotspots around the state, a line which was reported to receive more than five hundred calls on a recent Sunday.

I have read recipes for making wine from dandelions, elderflowers and sunflowers, and have the nagging urge to become filthy rich selling bluebonnet wine, which I have no doubt Texans would buy by the case even if it smelled like wet socks and tasted like India ink. Of course, you'd have to grow the wildflowers yourself, because picking wildflowers on public land is simply not done. Claims of its illegality and of stiff fines or other imaginary punishments persist and are widely circulated, though untrue. Even those who know better agree that it is a sin even if it is not a crime.

You would expect it to be an equally grave offense to crush or trample the flowers, but this runs against the grain of even stronger stuff in the Texan psyche. An unspoken tradition finds the shoulders of area highways dotted by parked cars as parents shoo children into patches of bluebonnets to have their picture taken, or venture into them themselves to prop babies in their Sunday best up against hidden diaper bags before retreating for the prized photo op. I have no doubt that it is also high season for portrait photographers, who often take family portraits this way. It is strange to see the trampled flowers in their wake; if Frankenstein had been set in Brazos County, Boris Karloff would probably have horrified the peasants by tromping through the same patch of wildflowers on his way from destroying this to pillaging that. But then, that's the way Texans are. They'll wave you howdy-do when your trucks pass on a deserted stretch of highway, but they'll go up a size the next time they buy one to make sure that if your trucks collide, they'll be protected because their truck will drive over yours.

The bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush are already beginning to pass their peak, and the whites and yellows and blacks are beginning to sift into the landscape. It is a luxury of the outdoors that we have savored all the more for it being so short, and there's nothing to be done about its passing; it is enough to be sure to remember it, for when the colors begin to fade at the edges it is easy to assume that one had imagined that brightness, that vibrancy, because these colors seem far more likely, as though they are really all we could ask for. Once last spring while on a walk, marveling at a patch of Indian paintbrush in the fields behind our house, I decided to bring a little of that radiant color home with me, and picked a few flowers to put in a vase inside. They were dead within hours — proof of their wildness, I guess, which is wilder than the wildness of tigers or wild boars. They cannot be claimed, and they cannot be outdone; all you can do is spread a few seeds and wait for next year's show.