In 1892, Washington prepared to send a floral emblem to the great Chicago World’s Fair — and the state did something quietly remarkable: it put the choice to a vote of its women, most of whom could not yet vote for anything. They chose the coast rhododendron, the great evergreen shrub whose pink trusses light…
High in a Colorado meadow, where the air thins and the summer is six weeks long, one flower stops every hiker mid-stride: a sky-blue star on a silver stem, five petals around a golden heart, each petal trailing a long, elegant spur like a comet’s tail. The Colorado blue columbine is the Colorado state flower…
Most state flowers are monuments to beauty. Utah’s is a monument to survival. In the brutal first years of settlement in the Salt Lake Valley — when swarms of crickets stripped the wheat in 1848 and hunger stalked the cabins — the pioneers lived, in part, on a wildflower: the sego lily, whose starchy bulbs…
Some state flowers you have to go looking for. Florida’s announces itself: in spring, whole citrus groves turn white at once and the warm air for miles carries a perfume so rich it has been bottled for centuries. The orange blossom is the Florida state flower — a small, waxy, five-petalled star on the same…
Texas does not do spring subtly. For a few weeks every year, the highways, pastures and cemeteries of the Hill Country and beyond disappear under a blue so deep it looks poured — bluebonnets, millions of them, shoulder to shoulder with red paintbrush and pink primrose. The bluebonnet is not just the Texas state flower;…
Some state flowers were chosen from a greenhouse catalogue. California’s was chosen from its own hillsides — the flower that turned whole valleys gold every spring long before there was a state to name it for. The California poppy is one of the best-loved wildflowers on Earth: a silk-petalled cup of orange-gold that closes at…
Ask ten people to name the Hawaiian flower and nine of them will picture the same thing: a big red hibiscus behind someone’s ear, or a white plumeria in a lei at the airport. Both pictures are true to the Hawaii visitors actually see, and both are wrong about the flower Hawaii itself chose. The…
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