austin wildflower

bluebonnets

Since starting this blog, I realized I've not written one single thing about wildflowers. My secret passion. Wildflowers are what started my interest in gardening. I'm now about 17 months into my gardening adventures. This makes me still a very new gardener. I realized this week with all my mistakes, and attempts to make something out of the extremely hard and dry clay soil of most of the land around my house, that I need a tiller, and not the little $20 hand tool, but something with a motor. That must make me an official gardener.

Or could it be the fact that I spent about 10 hours earlier this week making compost? Surely that makes me an official gardener. And officially obsessed.

What really got me obsessed are wildflowers. It all started when I drove by this strange little bird-flittering, butterfly-twirling patch of wildflowers, dead trees and half-grown grass in a neighborhood north of mine. I had to stop and turn around. It was mystery itself, contained in about a 50 square foot area. It looked wild but carefully wild. Someone had made it that way, and the life in it just buzzed. I do not like formal gardens, and maybe that is what I thought gardens had to be. And now I saw something that made me want to put life in my yard. (By now I have tried all sorts of plants and design arrangements but for the first 6 months I remained totally obsessed with native wildflowers and grass.) Just one month earlier I had decided that it was time to do something about the barren back yard of mine. I had never planted a flower in my life. Really.