Week 3Spring Week 3
Their names alone serve as a clew to their entire histories, giving us that sense of companionship with our surroundings which is so necessary to the full enjoyment of outdoor life.
—Mrs. William Starr Dana, How to Know the Wild Flowers
Stickywilly plants are nearly universal across the temperate world, but their blossoms are so slight and so transitory that you may believe you’ve never seen one. And perhaps you haven’t—they are easy to miss, even in weedy places, even if you happen to be wandering there while the spring ephemerals are blooming beneath the bare trees. April brings the stickywilly’s four-petaled, starlike flowers, but they are so small and close to green, even in full bloom, that I must stoop and peer to tell whether I am looking at buds or blossoms. Sometimes I only know I’ve been among them because their seeds have come into the house with me, clinging to my socks.
Naturalists call the plant by its botanical name, Galium aparine. It grows nearly everywhere and offers itself for many human uses: as a hot drink, in a cake, as a salve for eczema, or as protection from scurvy. But it goes by so many common names that stickywilly recipes passed down in rural families are hard to share because it would not be clear to others what wildflower, when dried and brewed, actually serves as a half-decent substitute for coffee. Is it catchweed? Bobby button or bedstraw or cleaverwort? Possibly it’s cleavers, or clivers, or any of the nearly endless riffs on the plant’s tendency to cling: stickyweed, stickybob, stickybud, stickyback, sticky molly, sticky grass, stickyjack, stickeljack, gripgrass, whippysticks. Shall I keep going? I could keep going for days.
I think of the serviceberry trees that bloom soon after the stickywillies. The simple serviceberry is native to every state except Hawaii. In the old days, the serviceberry’s five-petaled blossoms heralded springtime, blooming just as snow melted on winding roads, just as mountain passes cleared. People who had spent all winter in isolation saw the serviceberry in bloom and knew that circuit-riding preachers would be along soon to perform the weddings and funeral services that snow had long delayed.
As with the stickywilly and all beloved wild plants, this harbinger of spring has many common names. What we call a serviceberry here in Tennessee is what people in other regions call shadbush, sarvis, juneberry, saskatoon, sugarplum, and chuckley pear. By whatever name they are locally called, the flowers were a welcome sight for the generations who came before us. Winter was over at last. Bright new life could begin.
Serviceberries are not much of a welcome sight anymore. So thoroughly have they been displaced from our cultivated landscapes that most Americans are unlikely to recognize this very American tree. For us, springtime means flowers that evolved for ecosystems in Europe and Asia. Those cheerful tulips and daffodils came here from northern Europe. The ubiquitous golden sprays of forsythia, the star magnolia, the flowering quince, the Yoshino cherry, the Bradford pear—all came to us from Asia, where the growing season so closely matches the heat and humidity of the American South.
But I embrace the old-timey plants that evolved to feed wildlife, the plants with names that change from place to place and people to people. And I will always insist on the homely names of my Wiregrass ancestors. It was stickywilly in the fields of Lower Alabama, and it remains stickywilly to me all these years later in Tennessee. What you call the wildflowers will tell you who you are.