This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Rock Island Lines is permitted two commercials a year. This is one of them.
I won't mince words. If you have any small sunny corner in your yard or garden, the drier and more neglected the better, you need to get your plant catalogs out and begin right now to track down one of our nearby prairie wildflowers: the poppy mallow (callirhoe involucrata).
The poppy mallow was once common all along the Mississippi River Valley, but it has retreated to fewer and fewer waste spaces. I saw my first one ten years at a city park in Oquawka, Illinois, just south of here.
Small cherry red flowers blanketed the whole field, as if children had carefully stuck American Legion poppies straight up every one or two feet, right in the grass. A miniature Flanders Field. Their satiny petals glistened in the sun. They stood up from creeping green leaves hidden deep in the grass.
You know how some books so unexpectedly take your breath away that you are forever giving your own copy to other readers? These bright flowers did just that. I suddenly understood Emily Dickinson's reaction to a field of wildflowers when she wrote "I taste a liquor never brewed."
A biologist friend later identified the flowers I picked and brought back as an obscure relative of the hollyhock and hibiscus, once ranging from South Dakota to Illinois. Never popular enough to have a common name, they were sometimes called Buffalo Rose in the Dakotas and wine cups, elsewhere.
The poppy mallow sends down a single deep tap root, its prairie survival tool, which makes it impervious to drought and to anything your lawnmower can do. It blooms from June until frost at the end of growing shoots. Each flower lasts a single day, but they are so plentiful I once counted 200 open at a time on a single plant.
You have to have one of your own. A word of warning: once you let one small Midwest prairie flower past your fence, bet you can't stop at just one.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
