Among The Wildflowers

I've done a few posts over the years about the wildflowers here in Texas.

Between February and May or June, they're everywhere, and they are often very impressive. They sprout up in any patch of open ground available to them, and line the freeways everywhere, even in dingy urban areas. They're a ray of sunshine in the deep darkness like that sometimes.

However, in all this time, I've never seen much of the state flower, the blue bonnet. I guess it must be Houston's climate. It must not be quite right for the spread of blue bonnets. Sometimes, you'll see a few of them here and there, but mostly its other flowers...yellow ones, pink ones, white ones, etc.

There's a trend here in Texas where people take their kids to a field festooned in blue bonnets and take pictures of them. I've seen the results, and the pictures are pretty great. I've even seen some blog posts about where the best place in Houston is to find enough blue bonnets to get a good picture.

It seemed weird to me that it was so hard to find them if they were such a big deal that the state of Texas decided to name them the state flower. Usually, that is reserved for something so prolific that it is a integral thread in the fabric of the society. You can't go anywhere without finding those flowers.

Well, this weekend, when we headed to the hill country to witness the eclipse, I discovered, at last, why blue bonnets are the state flower. As we drove away from Houston, the freeway was lined with yellow flowers, and orange flowers, and pink flowers, but here and there, we started to see some blue flowers. I even saw a large patch of them on the side of the road near Huntsville, and someone had pulled over on the freeway and set their kid in the middle of them for a picture.

Then we started getting more and more blue bonnets. Eventually, the blue bonnets completely took over. You might see some other flowers here and there, but the fields, the meadows, and the sides of the roads were covered with thick, shoulder to shoulder blue bonnets.

I wasn't about to stop on the side of the freeway for a picture like the lady did in Huntsville, but I smiled as I looked at the scenery through the whole drive. I hoped that our destination would have blue bonnets to see, and my hope was rewarded. They were everywhere, choking the fields and growing right up to the very edge of each campsite. Have you ever seen blue bonnets? Well, let me disgorge on you a bunch of my favorite shots that I took while there.