When I was seven years old, a wonderful thing happened. It was during our annual family picnic at a state park on Long Island. While aunts, uncles, and cousins were playing ball, rowing around the lake, or barbecuing hamburgers, my Dad and I took a hike on the perimeter trail that circled the picnic area.

Part way around, on land adjacent to the park, we came upon a breath-taking sight: acres of daisies, as far as the eye (of a four-foot tall child) could see. We walked into the field to get a better look at them. We saw little spiders in the center of some. Bees and butterflies were everywhere.

Perhaps to a country kid a field of flowers would be no big deal. But this little girl lived in a row house in Brooklyn, and her experience of “nature” was limited to Dad’s small, fenced backyard garden. This field of daisies under a clear blue sky was the most beautiful scene I had experienced in my life.

Since they were abundant, Dad allowed me to pick a big bunch, and Mom back at the picnic area put them in a jar of water. The next day I took half of them to school and gave them to my second grade teacher, who set them on her desk for the whole class to enjoy.

Glenda

On a recent hike along one of our favorite trails high above the Chattooga River, we passed a woman with an armful of freshly picked wildflowers. We recognized in her bouquet many of our favorites: hare bell, fire pink, angelica, starry campion, and even the rare Michaux’s saxifrage. Annoyed, we asked sarcastically whether she left any for other hikers to enjoy, and she replied, “Oh, there’s lots.”

On returning to the trailhead parking area, we saw this same armful of flowers, now wilted, discarded by the side of the road. For a few minutes of selfish pleasure this woman had denied the rest of us the thrill of glimpsing groups of these beautiful flowers blooming in their natural habitat. For there were not “lots” left along the trail. We could see where she had plucked these plants from their roots, often pulling up roots before breaking off the stems.

This incident occurred on the Whiteside Mountain National Recreation Trail. Thousands of people hike this trail every summer to enjoy the full range of nature’s wonders there, not only the spectacular views from the summit, but also the birds and plants of the forest and ridge top habitats. The plants on Whiteside are not the common field daises and Queen Anne’s lace. The names of Whiteside’s plants reflect their rarity: Blue Ridge St. John’s wort, granite dome goldenrod, pale corydalis, Appalachian bluets, granite dome locust, wretched sedge, poke milkweed, pinkshell azalea, Blue Ridge dwarf dandelion, as well as the flowers mentioned above.

There is a deep, and wonderful, impulse in every child, especially little girls, to reach out and pick a flower, be it in a garden or alongside a wooded trail. This impulse remains within many of us adults, and often it takes great will power to hold back a hand that wants to pluck a wildflower from a public nature trail. In the case of the woman cited above, the parking area at the Whiteside Mountain trailhead was full of cars, and the woman had obviously passed numerous hikers. If only a small fraction of these visitors each picked a few flowers, soon there would be none for the rest of us to enjoy. It should not require a sign to remind visitors of this.

The habitats on this mountain, and on other mountains surrounding the Chattooga basin, are fragile. Many of the plants and animals there are isolated relics of ancient times, and their struggle for survival is difficult enough without interference from humans. Sometimes a little ecological knowledge of such things can help hold back that hand that reaches out to pick a pretty wildflower.

Our annoyance on seeing the armful of picked flowers was worsened by the knowledge that this careless woman had set in motion a whole chain of events that will echo through their little habitat for years to come. First, what are their pollinators to do? Many insects depend for their life support on the nectar and pollen of these flowers. And the health and vigor of the meager seed crop of the few remaining flowers will be impaired by the loss of cross -fertilization from the flowers that were picked.

Even though the plants that had their flowers removed are all perennials, and most will flower again next year, the loss of the seed crop will reduce the number of seedlings necessary to keep the population healthy in the future. We have observed that the populations of some wildflowers have dwindled over the years—a few all the way to zero—by the zealous picking of unthinking people.

The impacts go beyond pollinators. Small birds and rodents that depend for their life support on the abundant seeds from wildflowers always suffer over the dormant season when they have not stocked up on this source of concentrated high energy.

Well, you can say, can’t the butterflies and other pollinators find their nectar and pollen elsewhere? Can’t the birds and the rodents find their high-energy food source farther down the ridge? No, they can’t. Similar niches in the habitats farther down the ridge are already occupied by other insects and birds and rodents. Some animals, even the most mobile, always die when a local food supply is destroyed.

Thus, to the insects and birds and small animals in a tiny wildflower ecosystem, the loss of the flowers is analogous to the impact on larger animals of the clearcutting of a forest. The animals that occupied the cut forest cannot just move into the intact forest next door, because this forest is already occupied to its full food-supplying capacity.

On a global scale, or even on a local landscape, all this fuss over a few wildflowers may seem trivial. But as we all know, a single minuscule event repeated many times, over many years, can bring profound changes. And anyway, even if you don’t buy all this ecology stuff, leave the flowers for other people to enjoy.

Would not the world suffer by the banishment of a single flower?

John Muir 1864

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