In an age that popularizes health foods, handcrafts, and ecology, wildflowers are a natural whose time has come. These sturdy natives, often mistaken for fragile domestic beauties, are surfacing in home landscape designs after thriving in fields and forests for centuries.
Maybe they are raising their lovely heads in captivity because gardeners have discovered their abundant qualities: They need little maintenance or water; they lure hummingbirds, butterflies, and other helpful birds and insects into the garden; they have an innocent, untouched beauty; they can replace lawns. And who can resist these easy bloomers with such unforgettable names as Skunk Cabbage, Mad Dog Skullcap, Turkeybeard, Spiderwort, and Fly Poison?
But it has not always been easy to find out how to grow and propagate these horticultural treasures. Americans have traditionally copied European garden designs, with the emphasis on mowed lawns, clipped shrubs, and formal flower beds filled with plants originating in other lands. Our native wildflowers have been wallflowers in American gardens.
Former First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, who recently received a congressional gold medal from President Reagan for her interest in beautifying the country, has been nettled by this neglect for some time. So in 1982, on her seventieth birthday, she donated sixty acres of land on the Colorado River just outside Austin and $125,000 to found the national Wildflower Research Center.
The center aims to learn as much as possible about wildflower propagation and to share the information with developers, park managers, highway departments, landscape architects, and anybody interested. "Already we are on the road to unlocking some of the secrets of wildflowers and to assuring their bounty in our landscapes for generations to come," Mrs. Johnson says.
Hobos, stick tights, and escapes
What exactly is a wildflower? Basically it's the flower of a plant that survives without help from humans. Almost every flowering plant was at one time a wildflower. Present-day wildflowers in this country are a mix of species from all over the world growing along with our own original native plants.
Actually, one person's wildflower is often another's weed. Queen Anne's Lace, goldenrod, Bouncing Bet, Chicory, wild honeysuckle, purple loosestrife, and oriental bittersweet are so invasive they're considered outlaws by those who define a weed as any plant that grows where you don't want it to grow.
Wildflowers are as inventive as hoboes at traveling from place to place. Some seeds are carried yards or even miles on attachments that look like parachutes or wings, like the milkweed's fluff, the tiny parachutes of Devil's Paintbrush, and the winged seeds of maples. Underground rhizomes or runners send up new shoots on flowers like aster and goldenrod. Burrs, "stick-tights," and "holdfasts" with barbs and hooks stick to humans and animals for a free ride. Bird and animal droppings, rainwater, and even floods also spread seeds around.
European migrations helped further the spread of wildflowers.
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