By Tori Pfeifer
As the winter season turns to spring, the air gets warmer, the grass gets greener, and the wildflowers start to bloom. In Washington County, some of the most vibrant and colorful wildflowers in the Brazos Valley blossom along farm roads and highways for all to see.
Lu Hollander, a tourism and marketing specialist at the Brenham and Washington County Visitor Center, has experienced many wildflower seasons in Brenham and surrounding towns over the years.
“We have all kinds of wildflowers other than bluebonnets. Typically, Indian paintbrushes come up around the same time as bluebonnets do, and can sometimes hang around a little longer,” says Hollander.
A variety of other flowers are scattered around the county during the heat of the season, according to Hollander. Coreopsis (a yellow, dandelion-like flower) and evening primrose (a small, pink blossom) grow with the bluebonnets, most commonly along fence lines. Towards the end of the season, Indian blanket — also known as fire wheel — blooms in large fields as well. The flower has red petals and yellow tips and is a member of the sunflower family.
Throughout Washington County, residents and visitors alike drive across the miles of farm roads and highways in search of the springtime blooms. Bluebonnets, Hollander explains, are the most popular wildflower people want to see, and they can be found in the most surprising locations.
“We have some standard places where they come up. A challenge we have is that a lot of the county roads don’t have shoulders, so stopping can be a problem,” says Hollander. “We have a few fields that are open and unfenced that generally have really good flowers, usually along Old Independence Road.”
Additionally, local roads like Farm to Market Road 50 and Farm to Market Road 390 have long stretches of wildflowers and bluebonnet trails, but lack any stopping points or shoulders, according to Hollander; other bluebonnet trails can also be found along Highway 105 and U.S. 290. The Visitor Center sends people not only to places in Brenham, but all parts of Washington County, including towns like Burton, Independence, and Chappell Hill.
“If, for example, Burton had really good flowers in a certain location, we tell them to go,” Hollander says. “A really odd thing is, here in [Brenham], the field behind our Walmart almost always has the best flowers. It’s a very safe place to go because there’s a street behind it with parking room and space for people to go. People laugh when we say that, but it’s definitely a popular place.”
Hollander says the Annual Bluebonnet Festival in Chappell Hill is an exciting event that is held the second weekend of April on Saturday and Sunday. The town has been hosting it for more than 40 years now.
Workers at the Visitor Center in Brenham start to map out the season’s wildflowers as early as the first of March and update the online Wildflower Watch page with the newest information as frequently as possible. Typically, they try to send people wherever the best wildflowers are in all of Washington County, says Hollander.
Wildflower season is from mid-March to April and can even last into May. For more information on wildflower watching in Brenham and Washington County, go to www.visitbrenhamtexas.com/wildflower-watch.
