One fun and simple way to promote wildflowers as legitimately beautiful flowers is to put them in a vase. Generally, I do not prefer to cut flowers. I prefer to let them grow. However, if they are encroaching on the sidewalk etc., I cut them back.
Blanket flower is my favorite flower. They are gorgeous, salt tolerant, drought tolerant, and to me they totally symbolize feral beauty and resilience.
I have brought them up often in my discussions with our city public works department, planning board, citizen input boards and so on. Because they’re so pretty, they are almost like an ambassador for natural low maintenance approach to landscaping.
But it never occurred to me till yesterday, that by putting them in a vase after I needed to cut some back, I was actually helping to legitimize them. In the mainstream public eye. This may or may not be true, but it’s just a thought that occurred to me. Your input and experiences welcome as always.
(Note, nobody — person, plant, animal, insect, microbe etc. — should have to be “legitimized.” They are all part of our world and we owe them respect and we need to let them live.)
But, in a society where a multi-billion-dollar industry is dedicated to defining some plants as “weeds” that need to be eradicated, sometimes a bit of social boost might be helpful. I like this example because it’s on social media, and it’s also right next to a sidewalk that gets a lot of foot traffic. Including tourists as well as residents.
celebrating wildflowers; natural dune beauty; respecting the ecology