As I did errands on April 26, a couple days ago here in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, I saw many beautiful bouquets of wild flowers, in abundance, along country roads. All those species of tough, adaptable flowering plants are from Eurasia, except one. In Eurasia, these types of vegetation adapted to agriculture and other human activities before being accidentally introduced to North America by European colonists.
All those plants form lovely, mixed carpets or patches of themselves. And all offer cheery, lovely colors that promote enlightenment of human emotions as one rides through cropland in spring.
These hardy plants flourish along roadsides because those sunny, human-made habitats are mowed occasionally, but not cultivated, allowing the plants to become established. They blossom from late March through May, but not all at once. These flowering plants are, in arbitrary order of blooming, Veronicas, purple dead nettles, dandelions, grape hyacinths, ground ivy, and common blue violets, the only native species in this grouping.
Each prostrate Veronica plant has a few tiny, pale-blue flowers. But hundreds of those blooms together make attractive rugs of color on roadsides, fields and lawns from late March into May.
A kind of mint, each purple dead nettle stands a few inches tall and has heart-shaped leaves that overlap like shingles and a little cluster of small, pink blossoms on top of its stem. Great carpets of this species make some roadsides and bare-ground fields pink through April and into May.
The abundant common dandelions are the most obvious and cheery of these alien species of vegetation along roadsides and on lawns. Dandelions have yellow blossoms that are each a little more than an inch across, and attractive peeking from green grass and other foliage on the ground of roadsides, meadows and lawns from mid-April into early May.
Often more than a foot tall along roadsides, all parts of dandelions are edible to various kinds of wildlife. White-tailed deer, wood chucks and cottontail rabbits eat their leaves, blooms and flower stems while mice and small, seed-eating birds, including finches and sparrows, consume their seeds in May, making the seed fluff float on the wind without their seed cargoes. But if not eaten, each seed sails on its white, silky parachute away from the parent plants. That seed might land on a sunny patch of suitable soil where it can sprout into a new plant.
Members of the lily family, grape hyacinths were introduced to the United States by people planting their bulbs in the soil of flower beds and lawns. Each plant has a few grass-like leaves, and a cluster of lovely, deep-blue, bell-like blooms, that look like a bunch of grapes, on top of a six-inch stem from mid-April into May. Because their seeds blow on the wind, grape hyacinths escaped cultivation and colonized roadsides, lawns and fields. Their flowers are most beautiful when mixed with the golden blooms of dandelions.
Ground ivy is another type of mint with a pungent scent when its leaves are damaged such as in lawn mowing. This prostrate species that creeps over the ground of roadsides and lawns has rounded, scalloped leaves and attractive, bluish-purple, small blossoms that peer out from grass and other kinds of vegetation from late April into summer.
Common blue violets, the only species native to North America in this grouping, have bluish-purple flowers that are nearly an inch across, and heart-shaped foliage. This violet species forms beautiful bouquets and carpets of blossoms along rural roads and on lawns by the third week in April into May. Like the blooms of other kinds of roadside, flowering plants, the blossoms of common blue violets enlighten many a human soul. And violet leaves and flowers are food for chucks, rabbits and deer in this area.
These wild plants create beautiful, mixed clumps and carpets of pretty blooms of yellow, pink, blue and purple in April and May. And those flowers are exposed in abundance along country roads where all can see, free.
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