It’s spring! With lots of rain and the wild flowers are wild. Hey that’s not a sentence but I don’t care. It’s spring with lots of rain. And the wild flowers are wild.
Here in my neighborhood, a friendly suburb about 6 miles north of the downtown, lots of homeowners are practicing wildscaping. That’s the practice where you give the wildflowers a chance to bewild and do their thing. Front yards and traffic islands and entrances to institutions are alive with the sweet bouquet of wild flowers and the buzzing of bees and the flitting of butterflies. I’m ecstatic with joy. As I imagine our winged creature friends are too.
Here is a picture of a small bee inside a prickly pear blossom sucking nectar and distributing pollen. It’s sex. Basically it’s sex and everybody knows how fun that is.
The small traffic island at Kenilworth and Chevy Chase is a fully fledged wildscape. I don’t know who did it but when I pulled up there were 6 or 7 sparrows in amongst the flowers, gathering seeds. They flew off at my approach but then returned. They knew I didn’t want their seeds.
There are token wildscapes too.
And gregarious wildscapes.
For those of us who think, well, wildscaping is just too radical of an expression for my yard - here are some pictures from the McNay Art Museum front entrance. That’s Austin Highway and New Braunfels with maximum traffic exposure. They’re making a statement.
Some wildscaping amounts to a single plant or group of plants but it’s still beautiful.
The birds and the bees and the butterflies and all the insects that depend on flowering plants for food and shelter, for wildness indeed, are happy as can be. Grateful too, and with a wet Spring like we are having, there is celebration in the air. I can feel it. Can’t you?
Indian Blanket (also called Firewheel) and Texas Sunflowers and Lantana and Bluebonnets and Morning Glories and Evening Primrose and the lovely False Day Flower and yes even Thistle and Dandelion, the Velvet Weed and the Mallow and the Prickly Pear, all beautifully named and present in the yards and medians of our fair city these wet May days. Even the small yellow blossoms of the Lawn Flower add to the nectarful offerings for ants and other tiny creatures.
They will all pass. Their time will end and Summer will set in. Homeowners will trim their sunflowers, pull out their blossomless ‘weeds’ and the hot dry season will take over. But for now, this brief respite, is about life burgeoning, blossoming, prolificating.
Is that even a word? Who cares.
music :: Electus - Oliver's Garden 4:37
wildscaping in the neighborhood