This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have a carpeting coastal wildflower: Indian Blanket (Gaillardia pulchella).
Indian Blanket is a species better known generically as just Gaillardia. It’s a low growing wildflower in the Aster family, Asteraceae. It’s soft, seafoam foliage bubbles up from the sand beneath as it spills onto a dune side. Floating up between these leaves light burning pinwheels of flame. A roaring disc of color over a bleak landscape that hovers and flickers on the seabreeze. Indian Blanket is one of our few wildflowers so specialized for our sandy shores. It’s a common sight razing the lots and lawns along Palmetto Boulevard as it consumes the sand and flicks tongues of color into its own updrafts.
Gaillardia is a curious and carefree wildflower that appears to grasp no concept of the seasons. It blooms chaotically and constantly throughout the year and never rests but finally. It is truly neither annual nor perennial and seems to choose it’s time and place to perish of its own accord. Sometimes it sprouts in fall and blooms in spring, other times the opposite. Typically neither but never predictable. It is a statistical plant that must be spoken of in generalities and assumptions for looking at the individual for answers yields none of use. Although it places such emphasis and effort into its floral art it invites few visitors in for exchange. Scarce nectar and sparse pollen entice few but the most mundane of neighbors as their petals pyre and roar to our attention. It is a true artist in its field, absorbed and isolated in its own methods, reveling in the craft of its creation and seeking no approval of others. Its work is meant for its own joy and not for ours. What significance we gleam is but coincidence for it seemingly exists merely for the sake of it.
