As we were driving through the Brush Creek area south of Tucks Chapel Road on the way to Rogers a few days ago, we thought we saw Effie’s flowers popping up along the hillside above the roadway. We always watch for those jonquils on Effie’s hillside every year, and every year they faithfully appear, sometimes a little early, like this year. They may get nipped by the cold weather before Spring is sprung, but with these mild winter days, I feel sure they won’t be long in blooming out and covering the hillside with beauty. Some 60 years have passed since we used to see Effie and Harry around town, or walking along the highway between Pea Ridge and Rogers, or at the movies in Rogers, but her flowers return year by year, like a living memorial, a harbinger of springtime and the renewing of the green world of plants andflowers.
Effie and Harry have been gone for many years now; as has Effie’s hero, Roy Rogers, and Dale, and Trigger. I hope in heaven Effie has been able to get to know Roy. Maybe he will appreciate knowing how she tried to warn him and protect him when all those bad guys with scruffy clothes and black hats and shootin’ irons were out to get him in the movies. In his life on earth, Roy probably never knew who that was back in the theater calling out warnings to him when those crooks were slipping up on him behind those boulders.
I notice too, that June and John Easley’s hill is getting ready to show out withflowers. My wife Nancy also has beautiful flowers in front of the house every year, although not yet this year. Even in wintertime, my wild onions and dandelions are doing well. You’d think they would give it up at least in January and February.
I think I never did figure out just exactly the difference between a flower and a weed. I know that if you plant it purposely in your flower garden it is probably a flower. If it grows out on the hillside where you don’t mind it taking up the space, it may be a wild flower, or it may be a weed that you don’t worry about. But if it grows in your garden where you are cultivating beans and carrots and tomatoes, it’s a weed. It is sometimes hard to figure out, because not all weeds are ugly. For example, a morning glory is glorious. It lives up to its name. But a morning gloryin the wrong place, like in your marigolds and zinnias, is bad, and it is not pleasing that it is beautiful. Another problematic flower that I’m thinking about is the honeysuckle. They are beautiful to see and the scent is sweet and nice. It’s just that the vines want to go everywhere and take over everything.
When I was a boy, our Hickernut Hill was the night pasture for our cows.
These days it is pretty well cleared for pastureland, but back in the 1940s and 1950s we let most anything grow up there that wanted to grow. So we had sassafras, hackberry bushes, chinquapins, sumac, blackberry briers, sage grass, blackeyed Susans, and daisies galore, along with the big hickory tree that named the hill, and a variety of wild flowers. Many of these were great-looking flowers and enjoyable, except if you want pasture grasses andhay crops to be growing there; which makes the daisies and black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s Lace into weeds. Some of the colors in the wild flowers were matchless. I remember mats of little purple flowers on the hillside; but I never learned a name for them.
Maybe one definition of a weed is a persistent plant which insists on growing where you don’t want it. To me a dandelion is pretty, the colors are rich; and the transformation to the puff ball of seeds is intriguing, except of course that the things come up yellow where you want green, and they crowd out plants that you prefer to have in their place, at least when you can get your ’druthers. I’ve heard that there are people who eat dandelions, like we always ate poke salad.
Who knows, one of these days we may have all this sympathy and appreciation for the dandelion, that beautiful, much misunderstood, poor, unappreciated delicacy!
Even the bull nettles and the bitterweed have interesting flowers. But with them, I have never been tempted to start enjoying them as flowers. When a flower tries to stab your bare foot, it’s a weed; and when it tastes bitter and purely awful and ruins your milk, it’s a weed. Likewise those old thistles that try to take root everywhere.
You can almost hear them saying, you may think you are rid of us, but we’ll be baacck!
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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 5 on 02/13/2013