Walk Around Sikes Lake With Pink Evening Primroses

Since I last walked around Sikes Lake a couple days ago, the lake has become surrounded by pink evening primroses, one of my favorite Texas wildflowers.

If memory serves the evening primroses are usually the first wildflower I see when wildflower season starts up.

My first encounter with evening primroses happened way back late in the previous century, when I drove to Texas, from Washington, to see if moving was something I might want to do.

It was at some point east of Amarillo, heading to the Dallas/Fort Worth zone, on Highway 287, that I began seeing pink flowers carpeting the landscape alongside the freeway.

At some point I felt compelled to geta closer look at these delicate looking flowers, so I got off the freeway to get a good look and a good photo.

It was a year or two later I came to learn the name of these pink wildflowers.

Texas wildflowers are sort of a natural wild version of coloring up the landscape like my old home zone does with cultivated flowers of various types, like tulips, daffodils and others I am not remembering.

The State Wildflower of Texas is known as the bluebonnet. I see few bluebonnets at my current Texas location, during wildflower season.

In my old home zone of Washington I would see bluebonnets, only in Washington the flower is known as a lupine. I recollect seeing a lot of lupines blooming the last time I was at Mount Rainier, August 11, 2008.

I recollect remarking that I did not know Texas bluebonnets blossomed in Washington, to find myself being told that those are lupines.

Googling "lupine" I learned the following...

Lupinus, commonly known as lupin, lupine, or regionally bluebonnet etc., is a genus of plants in the legume family Fabaceae. The genus includes over 199 species, with centers of diversity in North and South America. Smaller centers occur in North Africa and the Mediterranean.

Maybe Texas needs to consider what the State Wildflower is...