Will the Real Texas Bluebonnet Please Stand Up?

Nothing beckons spring in Texas quite like the carpets of bluebonnets on our miles and miles of highways. Texans are so enamored with their state flower that it’s not uncommon to see carloads of family members, pulled over on 75 mph highways, posing for pictures in a sea of brilliant blue flowers. With the advent of social media, we wait for the ubiquitous Easter photos of kids taken in a local patch. My son and his peers are now of the age where it’s “not cool” to pose for silly photos, so I am relegated to admiring my friends’ photos of their sweet, younger children.

My son poses in his grandpa's bluebonnets.
My dad collected these seeds from my great grandmother's patch
and grew them in our yard at my childhood home. 

One of my favorite memories as a child was spending Easter Sunday in my great grandmother’s bluebonnet patch. Family legend has it that she transplanted three bluebonnets from somewhere, and by the time I came along had more than an acre full that grew melodiously alongside Drummond phlox. She and my great grand father bought 100 acres in northwest Harris county more than a century ago, and until recently most of my extended family lived on divided up parcels.

Easter was a time for us all to come together, eat chicken and dumplins and hunt Easter eggs in the bluebonnet field. When I was still quite small, the ladies would still wear long dresses and old-fashioned sunbonnets and we’d take turns posing for generational photos in that lovely field of flowers.

In the photo on top, my great grandmother and I pose in our Easter dresses in her bluebonnets. On bottom, my husband and his grandmother inspect their bluebonnets in Tyler County.

It was many years before I realized there was a difference between the bluebonnet from home (and those that I find in East Texas) and the bluebonnet that is most thought of as the symbol of Texas. I grew up with the sandyland bluebonnet, and that is the species that most commonly occurs in the sandy soils of southeast Texas. It's a bit less intensely colored, and lacks the white tip of the one we most likely associate with, the Texas bluebonnet.



Stepping back into history to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the idea for states to adopt a state flower came to life. State legislatures were encouraged to choose the floral symbol that best represented their state. The cotton boll was promoted as the “white rose of commerce” by businessman and legislator Phil Clement. John Nance Garner, who would later become the vice-president under Franklin D. Roosevelt, championed the flower of the prickly pear cactus. A campaign that would earn him the nickname of Cactus Jack. Finally, someone with sense and botanical taste, legislator John Green of Cuero, proposed the bluebonnet. The idea didn’t really take hold until the ladies got involved. The Texas Chapter of the Colonial Dames of America stepped in, pulled out their big guns and showed the Texas Legislature just what they needed to see to adopt the bluebonnet as the state flower in 1901.

At the time, the legislature designated the sandyland bluebonnet, Lupinus subcarnosus, as the state flower. There are actually 6 species of bluebonnets in Texas, with the Texas bluebonnet, Lupinus texensis, being the most recognized. The sandyland bluebonnet was considered the less showy of the two species, and is certainly less commonly occurring. In 1971, the Texas Legislature amended the resolution to include the Texas bluebonnet “and any other variety of bluebonnet not heretofore recorded.” Which means we technically have 6 state flowers, at least until another species is identified. I am eager to find the sundial lupine, Lupinus perennis, that occurs uncommonly in deep southeast Texas. I’ve seen one in the wild, but like good and bad hair days, this particular specimen wasn’t living up to it’s potential.

Lupinus subcarnosus, the sandyland bluebonnet lacks the white tip of the more familiar Texas bluebonnet.

Bluebonnets were named for their resemblance to sunbonnets worn by pioneer women, they were also known by a few other names. The Spanish called them el conejo, which means "the rabbit," for the white tips of the flowers resembling the white tail of a cottontail rabbit. Natives and early settlers believed that buffalo and cattle ate them, and called them buffalo clover. I imagine any state legislator would have a hard time trying to proprose something called buffalo clover, or something named after a varmint as the floral representation of their state.

It was many years before I realized there was a difference between the bluebonnet from home (and those that I find in East Texas) and the bluebonnet that is most thought of as the symbol of Texas. I grew up with the sandyland bluebonnet, and that is the species that most commonly occurs in the sandy soils of southeast Texas. It's a bit less intensely colored, and lacks the white tip of the one we most likely associate with, the Texas bluebonnet. On closer inspection, the individual florets of the sandyland bluebonnet are much more loosely spaced than the ones more tightly clustered on the flower stalks of the Texas bluebonnet. Once you see them side by side, they're pretty easy to tell apart.

Despite it’s designation as the “less showy” of the two prominent Lupinus species of Texas, the sandyland bluebonnet will always be my favorite, probably for sentimental reasons but that's just fine with me.

A honeybee forages for nectar in the Texas bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis).