Happy Fourth of July!
When I was a kid, I used to love the fireworks show that the Town of Amherst put on at UMass. There were some very creative people putting those shows together, because they came up with the idea of having three ships outlined in red, white, and blue, and the ships would do battle with one another.
Roman candles, or something like that, were fired by one ship at another and eventually one would “sink” when the post holding it up would be dropped. Eventually, a winner would emerge, but you never knew which ship it would be from one year to the next.
Personally, I always cheered for the blue ship.
Then the really big fireworks would start up. Again, my favorites were the big blue ones, but they were all beautiful. I suppose the thing I most liked about them was the fact that they looked like huge, fiery flowers.
Some looked like zinnias or dandelions or clovers. There were also a few that looked like giant palm trees, or at least they looked that way to me.
Now, don’t get me wrong here. I am not the first person who ever thought fireworks looked like flowers. If you’ve ever gone to a store that sells fireworks, you will have noticed that a lot of them have some reference to flowers in their names, like “jade flowers,” “rose blossoms,” or “butterflies and flowers.” Fireworks and flowers just seem to go together.
As an adult, I have attended many fireworks shows with my camera and have managed to capture some nice images of the colorful pyrotechnics.
Time and time again, I see flowers in these pictures, but there are certain flowers that look more like fireworks than others. Specifically, the flowers that radiate out in a disc with many slender petals tend to look like fireworks.
There are many flowers that fall into this category. In our area, there are flowers like dandelions, daisies, hawkweeds, asters and even sunflowers, but as I looked through my photos in search of a good example.
I struck gold with a species called spotted knapweed (Centaurea maculosa). It was just the right color to match one of my fireworks photos, and it has just the right kind of petals.
Although the spotted knapweed is a well established plant in America, it is not an American flower. Native to the eastern part of Europe, it wasn’t found in North America until sometime in the late 1800s. It’s possible that I hadn’t ever seen a knapweed flower when I was a boy, but by the year 2000, the plant had spread across most of the country.
Like many successfully introduced species, the spotted knapweed likes areas that have recently been disturbed. This is a good habitat to like, because humans are so good at disturbing the landscape.
In fact, we maintain areas of perpetual disturbance like the edges of parking lots and the sides of roads.
Sometimes referred to as “waste places” in the field guides, these are areas that offer little to no competition from other plants that can’t handle disturbances very well.
The spotted knapweed is also referred to as a, “pioneer species,” because it is particularly good at finding and settling areas that have recently been disturbed. This makes sense, because if you prefer disturbed areas, you need to be able to find them.
But, how does a plant do this? I mean, plants can’t just get up and go on and adventure. Do you have any ideas?
That’s right!
The knapweed plant produces seeds that can float on the wind and drift to new places. Most of these seeds must end up in the wrong sorts of places, but if just one happens to accidentally land in a disturbed place, the pioneer will put down roots.
So if you go out to see the fireworks, see if you notice any that look like flowers. Then, imagine that those beautiful, fading sparks are the seeds going off to find new places to live.
Bill Danielson has worked as a naturalist for 22 years. In that time, he has been a national park ranger, a wildlife biologist and a field researcher. his Kids and Critters column for young readers appears the first Monday of each month. Visit: www.speakingofnature.com.