Bramblings: Wildflower eye-opener

By BECKY NELSON
A friend dropped off a gift for me the other day: a “bee house” with bamboo tubes to attract native pollinators to take up residence now graces an outdoor corner of my carport. With plenty of wildflowers and planted flowers around the house, I should be able to attract some local native bees to take up residence and then help pollinate my crops in the fields all around the farmhouse.

Speaking of wildflowers, the other day I noticed a couple of lady’s slipper flowers on an embankment beside the road. I was thrilled to see the delicate wild orchid, never having seen them in this area of the farm before. Perhaps the plant had been growing there for years and I just never noticed it when it was in bloom, perhaps it was new to the area. No matter its history, I was thrilled to find it.

The farm is a colorful tapestry of wildflowers right now. Only the lilacs from the “planted” vegetation are still hanging on, so the bees and other pollinators have had to scrounge for wildflowers. While we were planting a second round of pumpkins the other day, I found and photographed several different wildflowers in the unplowed strip of land between the plantings. It would have been easy to walk right by them and never notice them, but having received the “bee house” earlier in the day, I was looking for what the wild bees might be finding for resources. It took this gift and this act of reaching out to me for me to even take a moment to notice what was around me. Most of them are what we consider weeds and unwanted guests taking up space in planted territory.

A couple of the flowers were easy for me to identify. Plantain, red clover and white clover were ones that I knew. As a kid, my dad would have us pop a flower from clover and munch it. There is a lot of nectar in clover, and the flowers were not an unpleasant taste treat. The others I tried to look up later with limited success. One was blue-eyed grass, and another I think was cinquefoil, one chickweed and one was something called shepherd’s purse. Creeping buttercup was another, an introduction from long ago in Europe that has spread all over the place. It is amazing at the diversity of wildflowers — and we rarely think to look for them.

When looking up the lady’s slipper — which a friend told me was a moccasin flower, not lady’s slipper (though I found no difference on wildflower identification sites) — I was fascinated to find that the wild orchid has a very unique symbiotic relationship with a fungus. Without the fungus, the orchid cannot live as the fungus shares nutrients with the seeds and then later in the life cycle of the orchid, the orchid roots feed the fungus. The plant can live twenty years or more if undisturbed, and the little beauties I saw the other day have more than likely been right where I saw them for some time. Also didn’t know that the pink lady’s slipper is the New Hampshire state wildflower.

Lady’s slippers need bees to pollinate in order to make a seed. Attracted to the bright pink flower, pollinators will go inside the pouch looking for nectar. Disappointed, they will leave the pouch, carrying a bit of pollen with them to the next flower. I learned a lot just by taking the time to find out.

My little wildflower tour and investigation has me thinking just how much like wildflowers we humans are. Even though I came of age during the “race riots” in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the protests of today finally have me looking deep inside myself at how easy it is for me to overlook the culture, diversity, quiet importance, beauty, feelings, fears and plight of my fellow human beings that are “different.” I don’t know what I don’t know, and the history, needs, wants, desires and daily struggles of some of my fellow humans is something that I have not seen or simply overlooked like a wildflower or a weed.

It may be time for me to start opening my eyes more; to my fellow man and woman and to the interesting “unseen” beauty and diversity around me. I need to stop walking by and ignoring both my fellow humans and the wildflowers.

Becky Nelson is co-owner of Beaver Pond Farm in Newport, New Hampshire. You can contact her through the farm page on Facebook and Instagram, visit the retail store or email her at [email protected].