The folks at UT sure caused a big stir about the different colored bluebonnets that appeared on campus this spring, 2014. It turns out it wasn’t a prank after all. Heck the scattered flowers weren’t even maroon. I know maroon bluebonnets because I helped develop them with Dr. Jerry Parsons years ago when I lived in San Antonio. Here’s how it all happened.
In 1985-86 I was in graduate school at Texas A&M University studying horticulture. At the same time, Dr. William C. Welch and Mike Shoup were starting The Antique Rose Emporium in Independence, between College Station and Brenham. Meanwhile back in San Antonio Dr. Parsons was working on a bluebonnet “colorization” project to plant a Texas flag for the state sesquicentennial comprised of red, white, and blue bluebonnets. The idea for the project was the brainchild of the late legendary Texas wildflower enthusiast Carroll Abbott known to many as “Mr. Bluebonnet.” He approached Dr. Parsons with the idea in 1984 with only a quick two years to get it done.
Like most Texans, Dr. Parsons (who isn’t an Aggie and wasn’t born or raised in Texas) didn’t even realize that bluebonnets existed in any color but blue. Carroll Abbott assured him that if one looked long and hard enough a few white bluebonnets could be found. And if one had the time and desire and looked even harder a very few light pinks could be found. Dr. Parson’s was assigned the task of finding these natural colors in the wild, collecting the seed, growing them out, rouging out the off colors, selecting the improved colors, replanting each, year and bulking up the seed all in less than two years. It was an impossible task! But Jerry is as stubborn as a mule and has a love affair with the impossible.
To Jerry’s credit, with the help of volunteers and local Belgian farmers, he managed to find and isolate both white and pale pink bluebonnets before the flag planting. Unfortunately red drummondi Phlox had to be used in place of red bluebonnets as it would take another 25 years for those pale pink ones to be gradually coaxed into reds. Jerry did no cross pollination and the plants certainly weren’t artificially “genetically modified.” All he did was take natural colors from the wild and isolate them so the “birds and bees” could do their thing.
In this process of selecting bluebonnet colors Dr. Parsons developed a method of scarifying the seed with concentrated sulfuric acid to increase germination. And with the help of local farmers he showed that bluebonnet seed could be produced as a commercial crop, which in turn dropped the erratic price of bluebonnet seed to something reasonable and stable each year. Still yet working with a local bedding plant producer he showed the world that bluebonnets could be grown, sold, and planted as transplants. I couldn’t help but think of Jerry as I drove by Lowes last week and saw bluebonnets for sale in the garden section. These were all revolutionary developments as the prevailing thought at the time was that bluebonnets could not be grown without inoculation with beneficial rhizobium bacteria and could not be transplanted. It turns out that simple fertilization replaced the need for the nitrogen fixing bacteria.
Now here’s where I come into the picture. The horticulturists at Texas A&M were quite jealous of Dr. Parsons as he was “supposed” to be a vegetable specialist. But here he was making earth shattering developments in the flower world. So they down played his bluebonnet work. But one Saturday while working at the Antique Rose Emporium a lady came in and told Dr. Welch that she had found “maroon” bluebonnets on the bluffs of the Brazos River not far away. So Dr. Welch got directions and sent me alone to locate them. It was a beautiful view looking across the entire Brazos River valley but I could tell immediately that the magenta pink flowers weren’t bluebonnets. They turned out to be loco weed (appropriately enough) a cousin to bluebonnets.
But even though they weren’t bluebonnets and weren’t actually maroon, word leaked back to the horticulture department at Texas A&M that Dr. Welch had found maroon bluebonnets and if Dr. Parsons was any kind of ornamental horticulturist, he would develop those instead. So in 1987 when I went to work as the county horticulturist for the Texas Agricultural Extension Service in San Antonio I carried those disparaging words about Dr. Parsons’ bluebonnet efforts in my head with me. Since I was working in the same off with Dr. Parsons and was born in love with bluebonnets, he immediately put me to work on the project. Jerry wasn’t good with color so my main job was identifying the best red candidates in the pink plots and pulling up all the rest. I had never pulled up a bluebonnet in my life but in my five years in San Antonio managed to pull up thousands. Seeing good, bad, and ugly colors has always come easy to me.
Eventually the small patch of developmental pinks was moved to a large production field in LaPryor, southwest of San Antonio. One day while going through the field there happened to be a few plants that had a mixture of both blue and pink in the flower. Technically they were shades of lilac and mauve I suppose. But I remember being so excited as I explained to Jerry that we could take those seeds and actually develop maroon! We could take what was supposed to be a disparaging poke at him from Texas A&M and actually make it a reality. As I told Jerry, all we had to do was combing blue and red to make purple and then combine purple and red to make maroon.
The problem is for every color selected and developed there had to be a completely isolated patch for both development and production; otherwise they’d all gradually revert back to blues. There also had to be somebody like me to pull out the unwanted colors otherwise gardeners would purchase seed that had off type colors in there and end up with beds that looked like those on the UT campus.
I eventually moved back to East Texas and Dr. Parsons still works on bluebonnets colors. The Alamo Fire (officially named ‘Texas Maroon’) selection that is sold by Wildseed Farms in Fredericksburg actually came out of the red strain of bluebonnets, not the maroon. He’s currently working on darker blues and something he wants to call purple but I’d call it indigo right now. If I lived in San Antonio we’d whip it into an SFA purple! You can read Dr. Parsons version of this whole project at: http://plantanswers.com/98promotions/julyoct/julyoct.html
Greg Grant is a research associate at the SFA Gardens Pineywoods Native Plant Center
Greg Grant, SFA Gardens
Pineywoods Native Plant Center
Stephen F. Austin State University
Box 13000-SFA Station
Nacogdoches, TX 75962
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