Steppe stars: Mentzelia nuda

Mentzelia nuda

 I have apostrophized this plant before in Requiem for a native, which you should click on eventually, if I may be so bold to suggest to you. This is one of our most exquisite native plants...

Mentzelia nuda

 For the time being (just as in the plot next to my house once) there are masses of these along Federico Peña Boulevard right now on the way to Denver International Airport--acres of them. Some years they're equally admixed with bright purple Spiderflowers (Cleome serrulata)--not so much this year--the annual hasn't fared as well as the tough perennial. At least not this year anyway...

Mentzelia nuda

It's hard to describe just how lovely these are in the late afternoon when they open: especially since they often grow in such vast colonies: you feel as though you're lost in a galaxy of stars! Like so many of our prairie wildflowers, I suspect that 95% of the people who live in the Front Range have never noticed this ever. A testament to "plant blindness"--the most insidious disease I know of.

(http://bonap.net/MapGallery/County/Mentzelia%20nuda.png)

I copied the image showing the range of Mentzelia nuda from the URL I have below: I love BONAP, and maps in general. It's worth spending a moment looking at this map, which so clearly delineates the High Plains (or "Great American Desert" of the Stephen Long Expedition, which was launched 200 years ago this year). Of course, they were wrong: the European (or Eastern American mind perhaps) hadn't quite fathomed true deserts!. More fairly, we could call this the "Great American Semi-Desert" or Steppe! And these shimmering stars are the harbingers of the twilight of summer--and were we as wise as the Japanese (who celebrate not just cherry blossoms, but many flowering festivities of the flower year), everyone in Denver would drive to a patch of these and worship. At least I do!

Now if you haven't done so, do click on my older blog and mourn with  me the loss of my own little local colony: Requiem for a native.

Steppe stars* once growing next to my house

 Since I suspect you may NOT have clicked as I asked you twice, I'm posting the last heartrending image of my current favorite wildflower from that old blog: the meadow next to my house was once full of treasures that have one by one been eliminated by indiscriminate mowing and now plowing, flattening, a big water slide idiocy (used once or twice "to appeal to the youngsters" etc. etc.)

Do sign up for our Steppe Summit where we celebrate the majesty of our incredible ecosystem: the ecosystem that gave birth to mankind in Southern Africa. Let's hope we can help bring our species to its senses before it's too late!

*(P.S. If you Google Mentzelia nuda, you'll see the "common name" that's used is "bractless blazing star"....forgive me if I splutter and rant for just a second (again!), but blazing stars are LIATRIS not Mentzelia: they MEANT to say "evening star" of course. But I think my coinage of "steppe stars" is even nicer for this specific species...these specious made up common names are of course ridiculous, but not as ridiculous as the pitiful fact that a plant that still grows by the million (and once grew by the trillion before wheat fields and mechanized destruction) is unknown to so many "locals" who have so little connection to nature that they don't even know the plant. If I could, I'd like to survey a few thousand Front Rangers: I'll bet not more than one in a hundred would know this plant. And truth be said my fellow Coloradoans are more aware of nature and spend more time in nature than almost any Americans I know of: we've become mere appendages to our smart phones, alas! End of rant.