Bluebonnet time isn't just springtime, it's a time "when the sky falls on Texas," as A. L. Morgan wrote. It is also a time of celebration—a celebration not of a victory or a foe vanquished, not of love, or wealth, or a deed of great valor, but a celebration of transcendent nature. It is a time in Texas when the land and the sky, the lakes and the rivers, and the ocean are blue. It all runs together and envelops us in its majesty and mystique. A celebration of being alive to glimpse again that azure panorama and be enveloped by it, each in our own way, as a child who can't resist the primordial urge to roll in the luxuriant blue robe that is cloaking his universe. Is it any wonder that no artist has been able to capture the essence of that celebration? It is beyond the capacity of humans to portray on canvas or with film what we have seen or felt in those few weeks in the heart of Texas when heaven and earth become one with mortals. Suzanne Winkler expressed it aptly: "Things of great beauty that also bear the burden of being common are difficult, if not impossible, to praise." I can add "or paint" without fear of contradiction.
Perhaps it is good that the spectacle lasts but a few weeks so that we do not become accustomed to it and we still have the vision to dream of and look forward to next year, and the next.
I can only agree with J. Frank Dobie, when he confessed that "no other flower—for me at least—brings such upsurging of the spirit and at the same time such restfulness." It is "a passion of blossom, a splendor of spread," according to Mary Daggett Lake. Margaret Bell Houston asked, in "Song from the Traffic," "Is any blue so blue?" And so far we have not even whispered of its fragrance, which subtly permeates the warm spring air.
When did Texans first begin noticing, and then revering, this anything but humble endemic wild flower? The first to observe the bluebonnet were trained European naturalists sent to this new land of Texas to collect yet unknown specimens of the plant and animal kingdoms.
In 1826 a twenty-year-old Franco-Swiss botanical explorer, Jean Louis Berlandier, was shipped to Mexico by his professor, the famous naturalist Augustin Pyrame de Candolle, as the botanist for the Mexican boundary commission that was attempting to establish the borders between the Republic of Mexico and the United States of America.
What may be the first recorded observation of the Texas bluebonnet can be found in the copious notes made by Berlandier in his journal of the expedition into Mexico (which included Texas at that time). On April 13, 1828, he departed from Ciudad de Bexar (San Antonio) on a journey to Nacogdoches. The first night the company bedded down at the Arroyo del Salado, about five miles from the presidio of the Alamo. That evening he wrote: "The fields, strewn with flowers, were yet only a small thing compared with what we saw in the upper regions of Texas. A lupine, verbena, delphinium, some lilies, and a great many evening primroses contrasted with the tender green of the grasses, from which sprang flowers of various colors."
Five or six years after Berlandier's trip, Thomas Drummond, a Scottish naturalist, ventured to Texas under the sponsorship of Sir William Jackson Hooker, who was later keeper of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, England. Hooker used material collected under hazardous conditions in that raw new land by Berlandier and Drummond to describe and name the two new lupines they had discovered.
Ten years after Hooker's description of the Texas lupine had been published, the methodical German geologist Ferdinand von Roemer made notes on the lupines he saw near. Gonzales while on an eighteen-month collecting expedition to Texas, saying, "They covered the hills with color." As yet they were not called bluebonnets.
Other than the reports of these three trained naturalists, a search of the literature for further evidence failed to produce a clue. Even the highly observant Frederick Law Olmsted, who seemed to miss nothing as he rode his trusted horse through the limitless expanses of Texas, failed to make note of the bluebonnet. He mentions the grapevine and Spanish moss, even spending some space on the "mesquit," describing it as "a short thin tree of the locust tribe, whose branches are thick set with thorns, and bears, except in this respect, a close resemblance to a straggling, neglected peach-tree." So we know he looked closely, but not a word of recognition to something as conspicuous as a prairie covered with bluebonnets. In Marilyn McAdams Sibley's reviews of the accounts of journeys of many early travelers, we are told that "history passed in review along the highways of Texas in the century 1761-1860," but evidently no one seemed to notice, or if they did they failed to leave records of their impression of our little blue friend.
Could it be that the bluebonnet was not so widespread or so plentiful during the first 150 years of Texas history? I don't think so. Those first hardy newcomers to the vast region we now know as Texas were just too busy with other things. The elements, in the form of blue northers and hurricanes, occupied their attention, along with hostile, mounted Indians, to name but two diverting factors.
After those intrepid pioneer Texians constructed shelter from the weather, they assured themselves of their next meal of corn pone and fried fatback with an occasional bit of game, a few vegetables, or an egg or two. Then they went on to "solve" their Indian problems. They were now ready to look at the big new territory. Or were they? Not just yet. Not before they had wrested Texas from Mexico as the sounds of the Alamo, Goliad, and San Jacinto rang in their ears; shaped it into a recognized republic; been admitted to the United States of America as the Lone Star State; settled their border dispute with their neighboring republic in the Mexican War of 1846; fought and bled with the Confederate States of America for what they believed to be their state's rights; endured the humiliation of Reconstruction; established far-spreading ranching empires; and discovered an ocean of black gold-oil, were they ready for some of the niceties of life ... such as, flowers. Namely, a state flower.
