Along the Way

One day in early summer, possibly in 1970 or 1971, my flower-focused wife, Vicki, and I were driving north on State Route 67 between Jacob Lake and Grand Canyon's North Rim when we saw a coyote sniffing at roadside blossoms. "Take time to smell the flowers" leapt into mind, and I thought, if coy-otes do it, why not me? Well, I'll tell you: because I was a macho hunter and fisherman and camper; and anything to do with flowers certainly had to be effeminate.

I slowed our van camper for a closer look and saw "God's dog" was not smelling, but chewing. It was catching grasshoppers attracted to the flowers. As an admirer of the coyote's ability to survive under the worst circumstances pitted by man and Nature, I felt vindicated.

Next, I wondered why the coyote didn't pick a safer place, then I saw that the roadside was the only place where flowers were growing.

In September a year or two later, coming down from Flagstaff, again the roadside blossoms flowed past our hubcaps. I said to Vicki, "We are going to stop and take a look at the flowers."

On hearing that from someone who feels everyone should chase down and grind their own sausage, she just might have fainted, so I quickly gave her a Cro-Magnon smile and added, "And, while we are at it, I will change the tire that is going flat."

Truthfully, the pageant of reds, yellows, golds, blues, purples, and numerous shades in between, coupled with Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade pouring out of the stereo speakers, had somehow shifted me into a Luther Burbank mood. I thought, in Arizona and other parts of the West, it must be close to impossible for motorists to be unaware of the blurs of color in spring, summer, and fall that are roadside wildflowers. Sooner or later, you must stop and, if not smell them, at least look closely. Even guys who wear plaid flannel shirts.

With blossoms mostly lupine, I guessed at eye level while I changed to the spare tire, I again noticed they grew only roadside, in a band no more than two to three feet wide. Why were they here and not in the land beyond? I had an idea but called the botany department at Arizona State University for confirmation and talked to a plain-language no jargon - gentleman named Dr. Vic Miller.

Miller said it was all very simple: the highways are designed to shed precipitation. Arched slightly, much more moisture accumulates at the shoulders of the roads than in the fields, meadows, desert, and forestlands beyond. Couple that with highway construction materials, which radiate heat, especially asphalt, and the germination process is vastly encouraged. In dry years, only roadside flowers may emerge. Highways, thus, are sort of the backhand of horticulture, and the flowers are a "fringe benefit" of civil engineering.

EVEN GUYS WHO WEAR FLANNEL SHIRTS TAKE TIME TO SMELL THE [ROADSIDE] FLOWERS

Then Miller told me that a few years earlier, after abundant rainfall, in preparation for a public-service television desert documentary, he called Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument headquarters near Lukeville on the Mexican border to make arrangements for filming. The National Park Service spokesman said, essentially, "We don't like to tamper with Mother Nature, but the plants [flowers] growing roadside are so tall and so thick, we may have to thin them out so visitors can see the desert." That's serious when flowers start messing up desert vistas.

All this got me going. It didn't take a whole lot of research most of which surprised me to learn that flowers are the reproductive structures of angiosperms, a term I learned to live with, meaning plants having seeds in a closed ovary that mature with some kind of fruits. Some of their roots couldn't resist that one go back 600 million years. There are more than 250,000 known angiosperm species, 50,000 in America; in Arizona, says Dr. Donald Pinkava, professor of botany at Arizona State University, about 5,000 species. (More than a few species grow in Antarctica. As soon as they get some blacktop highways built there, you'll see displays of them, I suppose.) The arrangement of flowers on a plant is called the "inflorescence." Say "corolla" and the mind draws a picture of a Japanese compact car; in the angiosperm world, it's the petals of flowers. "Flora," the Latin collective term for plants, was the name of the Roman goddess of flowers. Derived from it are dozens-upon-dozens of words: floret, floriated, floribunda, floriculture, florid, florigen, florilegium, to name a few.

In Arizona, typically, time of year and elevation affect what roadside flowers you can expect to see. In the desert, following a wet winter, billions upon billions of blossoms may be on display. The most common species are goldpoppies, desert marigolds, brittlebush, lupine, orange globemallow, owl clover. Then, moving into higher elevations and through summer and into fall, you find species of the agave family, such as the yucca and the century plant, not really roadside flowers but worth a few extra steps. Roadside flowers include prickly-poppies and princes-plumes, penstemons and paintbrushes, lupine and goldenrods, Bigelow asters and sweetclovers, scarlet gilia and salsify, and several other species of sunflowers. Sufferin' succotash!

Bees, birds, bats, and other animals are drawn to flowers' fruits and scents. Hummingbirds love penstemons, and Kaibab coyotes find blossoms a fine hangout for tasty grasshoppers.

Like comedian Rodney Dangerfield, I have reached the age where when I bend over to tie my shoes, I look for something else to do while I'm down there. For someone who regularly rendezvouses with roadside flowers, that's not all bad.