The Very Best Wildflower for Texas

Every spring the Falangist Daily runs a few environmental articles featuring wild flowers. That’s because many have liked to go along in the spring in their great vehicles and look at the wildflowers situated on the backslopes of the highways out the car window. Inevitably, given the passage of time, some have whined. There are less wildflowers these days than there used to be. What’s happened to our wildflowers? The public whining is the reason the spring wildflower articles persist.

Well. Maybe the road got widened. And that was that. No more wildflowers at that particular location, ever.

Yepper. Lots of times when the roads get improved they have to like scrape off the adjacent vegetation or park a bull dozer on top of it. Shit like that happens. No more wildflowers, ever.

Then, when they go to reseed that area, by accident or design, alien weeds get in the seed mix. Thus what once appeared as a nice bunch of wildlflowers now appears as a grassy sward. No more wildflowers, ever.

At TxDOT, the world’s most over funded state agency, the responsible parties will explain that the primary business of the department is to build and maintain transportation facilities for the expeditious movement of people and stuff in the direction of progress, or something like that.

Thus, wildflowers on the side of the road is not the highest priority. The fact is, that wildflowers got famous or notorious due to their conspicuous location on the backslopes was an accidental phenomena or perversion of nature. Yes. As many have noted, universal, unrestrained herbivory took care of the wildflowers elsewhere across the Republico. However, the livestock and deer never can effectively eat up all the wildflowers on the backslopes because lots of those hungry herbivores get hit by cars, thus thinning everyone out.

But all that’s a mistake of history that shall be repeated again an again in the Republico until the last native wildflower is inevitably gotten shut of. So what Crumby would really like to discuss with everyone is Sherardia arvensis.

Sherardia arvensis is an introduced European wildflower. It’s just not the sort of wildflower most think of when they image, wild flower. No. Sherardia is not showy. Plus it hardly gets very tall. So it’s perfect for lawns that get mowed real short all the time. But it also deals well with infrequent mowing.

Sherardia used to be rare in these parts. But now, Crumby sees it everywhere. The fact is, we have to pull it up from the CB bar ditch where it persists and even increases despite competition from native plants. If we don’t pull it up, it shall roar out of the bar ditch and get everywhere. Control of a weed like Sherardia, to keep it from going everywhere, requires constant vigilance.

Thus, in a perverse way, Sherardia is a perfect wild flower for the Republico duh Booblico where constant vigilance is an even lower priority than wildflowers on the backslope. Plus, no matter what TxDOT does to the backslope, there shall always be plenty of Sherardia