Give a child a piece of paper and some crayons and ask for a drawing of a flower and what do you get? A daisy, or something similar, with a central circle of one color surrounded by petals of another color. Why, you might even find a smiling face leering up at you from the center of the flower.
What did hippies stick down the barrels of soldier's rifles? Daisies. After all, one of the kids whom was killed at Kent State told a National Guardsman the previous day, "Flowers are better than bullets.".
So what the heck am I getting at, anyway? Daisies. Asters. Sunflowers. The archetypal flower. The Sunflower (or Daisy, or Thistle, or...) Family (Asteraceae or Compositae). When we think of flowers, these are the types of flowers which come to mind. These are the types of flowers we put in vases and plant in the garden. These are the types of flowers that give us joy, and satisfy some basic botanical void.
Or not.
The point is, we are surrounded by the Sunflower Family. We cannot escape them, and they have burrowed their way into our being. (Sounds a bit like "Altered States", huh?) It's a big family, and we are all familiar with it.
These flowers make me so giddy I want to say there are zillions of them, but there aren't. There are somewhere upward of 19,000 species, in more than 900 genera. They grow all over the world. They are in our face and wonderfully so.
Wildflowers include...take a deep breath, there are, well, zillions of 'em... the Ironweeds (genus Veronia), Joe-Pye Weeds and Bonesets (genera Eupatorium and Kuhnia), the beautiful ,beautiful Blazing Stars (Liatris), Gumplants (Grindelia), Golden Asters (Chrysopsis), the multitudinous and ubiquitous Golden Rods (Solidago and Euthemia), the equally multitudinous and ubiquitous Asters (Aster as well as an assortment of other genera), Fleabanes (Erigeron and Leptilon), Everlastings (Antennaria), Cup-plant , Prairie Dock, Compass Plant and Rosinweeds (Silphium),the Coneflowers (Rudbeckia, Ratibida and Echinacea ), our big happy Sunflowers (Helianthus), the Tickseeds (Coreopsis), Yarrow (Achillea), Wormwoods and Mugworts (Artemisia), Groundsels (Senecio), prickly Thistles (Cirsium), Knapweed and Corn-flower (Centaurea)...somewhere around 600 species in more than 100 genera.
Go To Page: 1 2
| Here's the follow-up discussion on this article: | View all related messages |
For a complete listing of article comments, questions, and other discussions related to Gregg Pasterick's North American Wildflowers topic, please visit the Discussions page.