The Texas Bluebonnet

If you did not grow up in Texas, the bluebonnet thing takes some explaining. If you did, you have had your photograph taken in a patch of them, probably before you could walk.

What it is

Lupinus texensis and several related lupines are collectively the state flower of Texas, designated back in 1901. They bloom in spring, roughly March into April depending on rainfall, and when conditions are right they blanket highway shoulders and open fields in a blue so dense it reads as water from a distance.

The state highway department has sown wildflower seed along Texas roadsides for the better part of a century, which is why the displays so often follow the roads. It is a deliberate landscape that looks completely accidental.

The photo ritual

Every spring, Texans pull onto the shoulder and put their children, dogs and graduating seniors into the flowers for a picture. This is a genuine cultural institution.

Two persistent myths worth clearing up. It is not illegal to pick bluebonnets in Texas — there is no such statute. What is genuinely risky is where people do it: parking badly on a highway shoulder and walking into tall grass that may contain snakes, fire ants and traffic. The flowers are fine. The interstate is the problem.

Why name a record after it

Because it spreads.

That is the whole connection. A bluebonnet season is not cultivated by anyone in particular. Nobody approves it. It shows up in the median, in the ditch, in the crack in the road you drive past every single day and have never once looked at, and then it is everywhere at once and there is nothing to be done about it.

Bluebonnet Plague is a record about making something for ten years that nobody asked for, by somebody nobody appointed. Calling that a plague is self-deprecating, and calling it a bluebonnet is hopeful, and the title gets to be both at once.

Where to see them

Central Texas is the heartland of it — the stretch between San Antonio and Austin, and the Hill Country towns west of there, are reliably spectacular in a good year. Peak is usually late March to mid April. Rainfall the previous autumn matters more than almost anything else.

Pull over somewhere safe and legal. Watch where you put your feet.