In the last month, our farm has logged more than 10 inches of rainfall. As the old adage goes, April showers really do bring May flowers. Flowers have never been of much interest to one of us (Ian), until we started to think of them as something more that just cosmetic. Southeastern Oklahoma is home to many dozens of native flowers. They all have their own stories and their own roles in the wider web of living things. Some, like Antelope Horns Milkweed, provide critical habitat to the monarch butterfly. Others, like Heal-All, have important uses in herbal medicine. All of them help the pollinators, and have relationships with specific microbes in the soil that add diversity and resiliency to the landscape.
This spring, we've started photographing the native wildflowers coming up on the Nan Awaya Farmstead as a way to begin to get to know them, and as a first step in learning to understand their uses and ecology. Here are some of the ones that are gracing the farm's landscape right now. Click on the pictures for a slideshow that will give you the flowers' names.