The beauty of wildflowers.

One of my favorite songs is “Cowboy Take Me Away,” by The Dixie Chicks. And I never truly understood the profundity it captured lyrically, until I grew up & developed a love for gardening of my own. My favorite lyrics remain: “I said, I wanna touch the earth / I wanna break it in my hands / I wanna grow something wild and unruly…” Dreamy lines.

Common wildflowers in NH.

When I truly discovered my appreciation for nurturing plant life in adulthood, that stewardship for flora both surprised me & moved my introvert’s heart. Suddenly, I understood a previously hidden knowledge. I realized that fundamental question of beauty & content, & I found loveliness in authenticity, in strength, in will & perseverance, in refusing to be tamed.

That tenacity commanded my admiration. It still does.

More beautiful native field blooms.

And when I think of gardens, I personally prefer a mix of the manicured with the rugged. Different vegetative architecture & color, shape & texture must add to the aesthetic effect. The messiness of Darwinian life, entangled & thriving, inspires visual delight. There’s a raw beauty, in Nature red in tooth & claw.

There’s also beauty in function regarding polinators, birds & bees & butterflies. Different kinds of life interact & create more life, in abundance, demonstrating fertility & fecundity. Abundance.

Native astors & rudbekia or “black-eyed susans.”

And there have been all kinds of references to wildflowers in great literature to this effect, as well-seen in Romantic works by authors like Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, & Coleridge, & even in Jane Austen’s novels. We can think of Emma Woodhouse, who despairs at having daisies as reminders of Mr. Knightley & Harriet: “I don’t think we should keep daisies in the garden, they really are a drab little flower.”

Or we can think of Emma Thompson’s brilliant screenplay adaptation of Sense & Sensibility, when Marianne Dashwood prefers Willoughby’s hand-picked wildflowers over Colonel Brandon’s hothouse blooms. Such a juxtaposition shows how wildflowers signify reckless abandon, unruly passion, & raw sensuality that even modern viewers & readers can recognize.

Joe Pye Weed.

Perhaps this is why the Romantic poets so frequently wrote about the wildness described earlier in my post, A Monday Musing, which highlights the West Wind’s congress with Flora as depicted in the myth of Clytie & Helios? Flowers consistently provided imagery those writers could employ to describe passionate acts deemed too racy for direct mention. Even original sin itself in biblical myth occurs in a garden, in the tasting of forbidden fruit, the result of the pollinated flower.

There’s an immediate sensuality tied to botany & horticulture due to pollination. Ecofeminism explores this linking of woman with landscape as a recurring trope. Maybe that’s why women learned in those knowledges were branded witches, symbols of untamed sexuality & midwifery? Dangerous & mysterious?

More wildflowers at the farm.

The fields looking to the Orchard.

Apart from any of that contextualization, there’s just something reassuring, deeply satisfying, in digging your hands into rich damp soil, in feeling roots & working through vegetation in the garden. There must be a primal instinct that simply kicks in, likely an imprint from generations before who were occupied in plant husbandry & agricultural production. Farm life is peaceful, soothing, yet it breeds life, wild & verdant.

Of course, a farm requires hard work & stamina, yielding a reward for the persistent soul. Maybe that’s why that Dixie Chicks song speaks to me so? The solitude & remote natural setting described speaks to my soul, the introvert’s soul:

“I wanna sleep on the hard ground / In the comfort of your arms / On a pillow of blue bonnets / In a blanket made of stars / Oh, it sounds good to me…”

A melange of color & texture.

Fleabane & salvia.