Texas Primavera

Bluebonnet Trails

Slightly more than a century ago, during the spring of 1886, Mary Taylor Bunton talked her husband into letting her accompany him on a cattle drive from their North Texas ranch along the Chisholm Trail. The young Mrs. Bunton was provided with a buggy, and she followed beside the herd on a hot and often hazardous journey through extremely rugged country. What impressed her most, however, was not the danger but rather the beauty. Specifically, the beauty of wildflowers.

Describing the trip later in her book, A Bride on the Old Chisholm Trail in 1886, she wrote,"Wildflowers grew in the greatest profusion everywhere and there were many rare varieties that I had never seen before. . . . Sometimes I would fill my buggy and decorate my horses' bridles and harness with the gorgeous blossoms, then I would weave a wreath for my hair and a chaplet of flowers for my shoulders. [. . .] Seated in my flower-bedecked buggy it was easy enough for me to pretend that I was taking part in a grand flower parade."

Bluebonnets are found in many places besides the open ranchlands. Today, they also grow along hundreds of thousands of miles of Texas roadways, allowing them to be enjoyed by virtually anyone traveling in the state. This is the result of a program started more than 60 years ago when Jack Gubbels, the first landscape architect for the Texas Highway Department (now the Department of Transportation), developed and implemented a plan for roadside beautification. Not only was Texas the first state in America to plant flowers along its roadways, the department has continued the project ever since. Today tons of wildflower seeds are planted along nearly a million miles of Texas highways each year.

In 1965, Congress passed the National Highway Beautification Act, largely through the efforts of Lady Bird Johnson, wife of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Both, of course, were native Texans and used the state as an example of what could be accomplished in other parts of the country.

In 1982, Mrs. Johnson helped establish the National Wildflower Research Center near Austin, and it became so successful that the facility had to move to a new location in 1993. Mrs. Johnson donated the land for the new center as well as helped finance building construction.

Although visual enjoyment is certainly the most obvious benefit of this project, the annual bluebonnet reseeding actually accomplishes several things. The flowers not only help stabilize the soil and replenish nitrogen, they also provide food for a wide variety of wildlife. At the same time, bluebonnets save the Department of Transportation thousands of dollars in mowing and maintenance costs in just the few weeks they are blooming.Although more than 5,000 species of flowering plants are native to Texas, it is likely that at least a few of the flowers Mrs. Bunton enjoyed were bluebonnets, Lupinus texensis. There are actually six different species of bluebonnets in the Lone Star State, and taken collectively they are such a strong part of the Texas heritage they were adopted as the state flower in 1901.

Mrs. Bunton was not the first to describe the beautiful blue flowers. Botanists sent from Spain and England as early as the 1820s to collect plant specimens in the New World were both amazed and awed at the vast fields and meadows of bluebonnets that stretched for miles across the rolling hills.

The very same fields become covered today, beginning in mid to late March and usually peaking during the first two weeks of April. Some have described the scene as a time when the sky falls on Texas, while others liken it to a gently rolling sea of the bluest blue. Whatever the description, to see such huge expanses of wildflowers is an unforgettable experience.

The bluebonnet is a legume, which makes it distantly related in some ways to wisteria, peas, and even clover because it returns nitrogen to the ground. It has five petals, and although its color is primarily blue, some pinkish flowers are occasionally found, as are white albinos. Insects readily feed on the flowers, and deer will eat them when nothing else is available, but cattle won't touch them.