Travel Story--Wildflowers of the Texas Hill Country

 In mid-Apriil, we drove south and west from Austin to find wildflowers in bloom. 

And there they were, all along the roadside

Texas roadside wildflowers

Texas is a big state, with forests in the east and near-desert in the west. The bloom of wildflowers in the spring is famous from the Hill Country in central Texas. Here, the conditions favor a lot of spring-flowering annuals. 

The iconic one is the Texas bluebonnet, Lupinus texensis (pea family, Fabaceae).

One bluebonnet

bluebonnet, Lupinus texensis

Many bluebonnets

a vast field of bluebonnets

This field is blue-ish, not blue, because we were about a week late for the peak of bluebonnet flowering. Two of three plants out there had seed pods (see the "one bluebonet" photo above, lower right) not flowers. This is an annual which flowers en masse, leaving lots of seeds behind for next year.

What was at its peak of flowering when I was there was the blanketflower (Gaillardia pulchella, sunflower family, Asteraceae). Blanketflowers have a native range all across the central U.S. (and have naturalized beyond that.) They can be annuals or short-lived perennials. A good rain the week before I came, after a dry winter and spring, and the blanketflowers were in full bloom. They are the red flowers in most of my photos. Texans often call them firewheels, not blanketflowers. To the north in the plains, the flowers are often half yellow and half red, so the name blanketflower is thought to reflect the colors of the blankets that explorers and settlers sold to the Indians of the plains, that common name is also Indian blanket or Indian blanketflower. A second interpretation of blanketflower is that they form a  blanket across the grassland (see the video below). Firewheel is a less puzzling name for these bright red flowers with yellow edges.  

firewheel, blanketflower, Gaillardia pulchella

Another annual in flower was the prickly poppy (Argemone anthemos, poppy family Papaeraceae) with big white flowers with yellow centers and blue-green foliage. 

Prickly poppy, Argemone anthemos

Two weeks ago I wrote about this annual, velvetweed, Oenothera pauciflora (evening primrose family, Onagraceae). Link. Here are its flowers. Mine is barely up. The growing season is much longer in central Texas than northern Colorado. 

velvetweed, Oenothera pauciflora.
That's the top of the barbed wire fence, it was easy to take a 
picture of the flowers on this tall plant. 

I wondered: why don't we go wildflower viewing everywhere? Places famous for carpets of wildflowers are the hills and deserts of California and Texas' Hill Country. And high elevations in the Rocky Mountains. These areas have simultaneous flowering by plants of different species, because their climate has only one right time to flower. The rest of the year is too [something] for flowering. For deserts, the rest of the year is too dry. In the mountains, it is too cold. 

The Texas places we found lots of flowers, the soil was very shallow, maybe an inch deep over a rock layer. That quickly dries out. Annuals that grow and go to seed before the spring moisture runs out can grow there; perennials will die of thirst over the long dry summer. Bluebonnets and firewheels, for example, took full advantage of the shallow soil and absence of perennials. 

scattered plants on gravelly soil

In dry areas, plants have gaps between them. Those are not open spaces, but rather part of each plant's root zone. The extra space is needed to gather enough water for the plant to survive. 

Where the soil is reasonably deep, the annuals make a beautiful display the first couple years after a disturbance creates open soil. Then, the annualls are steadily replaced by perennials, until the annuals only occur scattered throughout the vegetation. But somewhere else the soil has been disturbed and the annuals are flourishing. 

In the above photo with widely spaced plants, the plants you see in flower are not annuals. They are Missouri evening primrose, Oenothera macrocarpa (evening primrose family, Onagraceae), also called fluttermill and narrowleaf evening primrose. Its flowers are yellow and open in the evening, wilting as they day gets hot and turning red as they wilt. 

Missouri evening primrose, Oenothera macrocarpa

Where there is a gap in the underlying rocks, perennials put their roots down, following the crack down and down, to gather water.

Roadsides are particularly good places for viewing annuals. Mowing, cars pulling off and other human activities keep it disturbed, favoring annuals over most perennials. Here's a bit of what the Texas roadside looked like, tho it went on for miles, not just a few seconds. The water that runs off of the road makes these plants better-watered than those farther from the road, important in a dry climate.

It was spring. Lots of perennials were also flowering, usually scattered, not as dozens of the same species.

The pretty white flower is Barbara's buttons (Marshallia caespitosa, sunflower family, Asteraceae). It shows you some of the diversity of the sunflower family, since it doesn't look much like a sunflower or a  dandelion. 

Barbara's buttons, Marshallia caespitosa

This was the milkweed we often found near the roadside annuals. I thought it very cool because it is certainly not the common milkweed of the East, Asclepias syriaca, or the milkweed in the ditches in Colorado and beyond the Rockies, showy milkweed, Asclepias speciosa.  (All the milkweeds are in the dogbane family, Apocynacaeae). This milkweed sprawled along the ground with those really big flower heads. It is probably antelope horns milkweed, Asclepias asperula, though there are other similar milkweeds in Texas. Antelope horns milkweed--the name refers to how the seed pods look--is one of the Texas milkweeds that best supports monarch butterflies. I saw only one monarch during my trip and was told it was a straggler, not the leader I imagined. This year's eastern monarchs had already migrated north from Texas. 

antelope horns milkweed, Asclepias asperula

And here and there, back from the road in unmowed places, were big stands of prickly pear cacti in full bloom. This is the Texas prickly pear, Opuntia englemannii (cactus family, Cactaceae). If you wanted a native "yellow rose of Texas" this would be it, since the native roses' flowers are in shades of pink. Introduced yellow roses have also claimed the title. Actually, the song is about a woman and doesn't require a real plant. 

Texas prickly pear, Opuntia englemannii

The white flowers in the photo below are lazy daisies, Aphanostephus skirrhobasis (sunflower family, Asteraceae). Looking like ox-eye daisies but just a little smaller, these are native wildflowers which open their flowers only in the afternoon, hence the name "lazy". As a visitor, I had no idea I would have missed them if we had been there before noon. 

lazy daisies, Aphanostephus skirrhobasis 

This is how the flowers might have looked if roadsides weren't mowed:

Another view of what we saw

Video from the bus window, longer and worse than the snippet above, but demonstating blankets of blanketflower

  

Fields of bright flowers are so wonderful!   

Comments and corrections welcome.

I thank Amanda DeLong-Amaya who led the day's wildflower hunt and Jordan Cook and Suzanne Laporte who organized the American Horticultural Society tour that got me to see these (bucket list) places. 

References

DeLong-Amaya, A. 2025. The Texas Native Plant Primer. Timber Press, Portland. Oregon.

Poppenwimer, T., I. Mayrose and N. DeMalach. 2023. Revising the global biogeography of annual and perennial plants. Nature. 624:109-114.

Kathy Keeler, A Wandering Botanist
More at awanderingbotanist.com
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Look Twice, containing stories of plants from western Nebraska and eastern Colorado, available from Amazon  link or from me. This is part of the unique western Nebraska ecosystem that burned with huge wildfires in March 2026.

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