Wildflowers

I can’t help it, wherever I walk I see flowers, and when they are the forgotten one everyone else calls “weeds” and I know they are imperiled by cutting or spraying, I bring a bunch of them home.

Wildflowers can be found anywhere, in an alley, coming up through the cracks in a sidewalk, they are our native species of flora, and feed our native species of fauna, yet we treat them like the enemy. I don’t walk anywhere special most of the time, just from my neighborhood a few blocks to Main Street, but there are railroad tracks, a creek, and an alley or two, always full of willing blossoms. I can cut big bunches to bring home and it hardly looks as if I’ve removed anything.

In this bunch, the yellow starburst is cow parsnip, the clusters of four-petaled flowers are dame’s rocket, the violet flowers are crown vetch, a type of clover bred for hillsides in Pennsylvania, the oxeye daisies are obvious, and the spikes of yellow flowers are yellow sweet clover; there is also white sweet clover but it must be on the other side.

I wanted the flowers in a vase but didn’t have any place to set it down and actually wanted some color a little higher than the basket on the seat of this chair, so I placed a mayonnaise jar in a blue plastic mesh onion bag and looped a knot of it over the top of the chair. The wildflowers are long-lasting and it’s shady in that spot, so they last a good long time, a week or more, unless, of course, I find another cluster of wildflowers that needs to be saved.

I’ll take a bunch of wildflowers over hothouse flowers any day.