Few decades ago somebody in Texas had a major revelation. Until that time grass on the sides of all major highways and even smaller roads was kept neatly and shortly trimmed. It looked clean and antiseptic like a lawn in any middle class suburb. One of the benefits was that it kept down the weed population by cutting them down before they had a chance to flower and drop their seeds. The big insight was the realization that one man's weeds could be another man's wildflowers and that many of them were actually pretty. The new way of looking at the stuff growing on the sides of the road not only resulted in delayed mowing, allowing the wild flowers to bloom, but the department of transportation actually started to spread wildflower seeds along those stretches of the highway where they appeared to be poorly represented. As a result, taking a weekend afternoon to drive out to look at the wildflowers has become something of a Texan spring ritual.And it is worth it! (Click on the images to see a larger version).

We decided to drive to the northwest to a little state park called :Washington on the Brazos". Most people never heard of it, but this used to be an important settlement in the early days and the signing place of the Constitution of the Republic of Texas. It looks like it was not very large at that time, but then, there were not too many large settlement in Texas. The location is logical and good, the town was located just downstream of the confluence of the Brazos and Navasota rivers. This made it possible for people traveling east-west to cross one river and not two and I also suspect it may have been as far upstream as one could reasonably sail from the gulf. The area is quite pretty, little hilly, much more scenic than the flat coastal plain that Houston is built on. But no matter how small it was 150 years ago, it is smaller now. In addition to the park there is a tiny village, literally only a handful of houses. But the park is free and has some nice meadows full of wild flowers.

In reality, though, one does not have to drive anywhere, because wild flowers are blooming everywhere, in every ditch and open piece of land. Houston is laced by a network of bayous (small creeks that can fill in a hurry when it starts to rain). The banks of the bayous are mowed only late in the summer and so they are some of the best spots to look. The one I go to is about 15 minutes walk from the house and in fact that is where I took most of the pictures for this collage.








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