Redneck Mother's Tribute to Lady Bird

When I read the following piece at the blog Redneck Mother recently, I liked it so much that I immediately asked if I could re-run it here. I am so happy the author said yes. (By the way, there's a wonderful children's book on Lady Bird, Miss Lady Bird's Wildflowers: How a First Lady Changed America, written by Kathi Appelt and illustrated by Joy Fisher Hein.)

Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson by Casey Kelly Barton

One of my favorite Texas women has died. Lady Bird Johnson was 94 years old. She was a steadfast political wife and a savvy media investor, but her greatest impact was as a champion of America's native flowers and natural beauty. She encouraged us to love our landscapes.

Winecup (Callirhoe involucrata), Inks Lake State Park

I didn't know the names of wildflowers when I was little. My mother is from Missouri, and my Texan father isn't into plants. There was one flower in particular that I loved, a small intensely purple blossom that popped up among the bluebonnets and yellow flowers each spring. On walks at the nature preserve, I would stare into the petals until my mother insisted it was time to move. I'd sometimes pick one only to watch it wilt before we got home. I never saw them in nurseries or yards. As I got older I paid less attention to wildflowers and more to school and friends and deciding what I wanted to "be."

When I finally became what I thought I wanted to be, I was newly married, in a technical job with a network-news outfit in Atlanta (no, not that one), and only slowly realized that I was terribly homesick and unhappy in my "glamorous" career. Sometimes I'd dream about those nameless flowers, the fuschia color fluorescing in my head. They didn't grow in Georgia.

During a spring return visit to Austin, I went to the National Wildflower Research Center, founded by (and later renamed after) Lady Bird Johnson. I was delighted to find the anonymous roadside and meadow flowers of my childhood blooming and labeled. I found my purple flower: Winecup, Callirhoe involucrata. Lady Bird Johnson cared enough about these plants to name them and show them off to the world, to insist that they were important. She understood that landscapes make meaning, create context. What validation. That plant craving I had might just be normal.

A few months later Hombre and I moved home to Texas, and I learned everything I could about wildflowers. I went to the Wildflower Center again and again. I wandered the soon-to-be-subdivision ranch fencelines near our apartment. I took pictures. I discovered Sally Wasowski's books and read pretty much everything in the library's wildflower section. We bought a house, and I bought wildflower seeds, rescued plants from construction sites, hunted for native plants at the nurseries. I became a Master Gardener. Our tiny backyard became a Backyard Wildlife Habitat.

When we moved, we chose a place with a big lot so I could garden. We have vegetables. We have fruit trees. We have native understory trees and some buffalograss. To the bafflement of the man who wields the weedeater twice a month, we have backyard flowerbeds full of tall grass and wildflowers, because I'd rather put up with the grass than lose the flowers. We have liatris and lantana, frogfruit and horseherb, Mexican hat and dayflower, bluebonnets and rock rose. We have winecups. I am who I want to be.

I credit Lady Bird Johnson with rekindling my love of wildflowers and plants in general, because she paid them enough attention and thought them worthwhile enough to study, to celebrate, to honor. How many people did she reach this way? I don't know. But a few weeks ago I was volunteering in our church nursery and brought in a handful of flowers from our wildflower meadow to show the kids. As I named the flowers for the toddlers, a teacher asked, "You know what they're called?" Oh, yes. Thank you, Lady Bird.