The Minnesota state flower is the one emblem in this whole series you are forbidden to touch. The pink and white lady’s slipper — Minnesota’s official flower since 1902 — is a wild orchid of the northern bogs, rare, slow, and protected by law: picking one or digging one up is illegal in Minnesota. It…
Every Memorial Day, Indiana turns out with armfuls of one flower. The peony has been the Indiana state flower since 1957 — and its election was really a coronation, because Hoosiers had been growing, showing and decorating graves with peonies for generations. Indiana was one of America’s great peony states, its nurseries shipping roots nationwide,…
Pennsylvania’s state flower is a piece of living machinery. The mountain laurel has been the state flower since 1933, and its blossom hides a trick no other shrub in the woods performs: each flower holds its ten stamens cocked like tiny catapults, their tips tucked into pockets in the petals — and when a bee…
One flower in this series is a memorial with petals. The Ohio state flower is the scarlet carnation, adopted in 1904 in memory of President William McKinley — the Ohioan in the White House who wore a scarlet carnation in his buttonhole every day of his public life, called it his lucky flower, and, in…
New York did not pick a species. It did not pick a colour. When the state finally settled its flower in 1955, it adopted “the rose, in all its variety and colours” — the whole beloved genus, red, pink, white, yellow and striped, from a Manhattan window box to the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden in…
Alaska chose its flower before it was even a state — and then, a decade later, wove the flower into its flag. The Alaska state flower is the alpine forget-me-not, adopted by the territorial legislature in 1917, a tiny sky-blue wildflower with a golden eye that blooms through the short Arctic summer on tundra and…
Every Georgia spring, a tough, thorny climber opens snow-white roses along the state’s fences and creek banks — and behind the flower stands the state’s saddest and most beautiful legend. The Cherokee rose has been the Georgia state flower since 1916, named for the Cherokee people, and retold ever since in the story of the…
Alabama fired its first state flower. In 1927 the state chose the goldenrod — and lived to regret a choice shared with half the continent and mistaken for a weed. In 1959, after a determined campaign by the camellia growers of Butler County, Alabama traded up: the camellia, the rose of winter, became the Alabama…
For about ten days each May, Michigan’s Lake-shore orchards do something no photograph quite believes: whole hillsides turn white-pink at once, row upon row of apple trees in bloom, with the big lake shining beyond. The apple blossom has been the Michigan state flower since 1897 — one of America’s earliest choices — and it…
Every state flower asks to be seen in daylight — except one. Arizona’s blooms in the dark. On warm nights in May, the tops of giant saguaros open white, waxy flowers like lanterns lit one by one across the desert, courting bats through the night before closing by midday. The saguaro blossom has been the…
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