story and photos by Derek Doeffinger
If I were to offer you a free trip to see millions of red poppies blanketing the rolling hills of Tuscany, would you take it? Or would you prefer going to Death Valley where the recent winter rains have transformed what some call the hottest desert in the world into a splendorous landscape of rampant color? Maybe you’d rather see some other super bloom destination. Perhaps you’d like to stroll through the knee-high bluebonnets shimmering and scintillating beneath the warm sun of Texas’ Big Bend National Park; their flowery fields sometimes stretch from your feet to the horizon.
These and other magnificent and flamboyant flower displays populate travel pages both online and in magazines. But getting to them can be costly and time consuming.
You may be pleased to learn that landscapes in the Finger Lakes, too, come alive with splendorous color. Starting in May and lasting through October, a drive through the Finger Lakes may reveal roadside fields ablaze with colorful blooms.
But let’s not get carried away. Most of our (but perhaps not all) bloom extravaganzas won’t be celebrated in National Geographic or Travel + Leisure magazines. At the same time, let’s not be too modest. In any given year, some of our blooming bonanzas can nudge the word “inspiring.” Just as many of our lake views compete against those offered by world famous locales, so some of our wild flower displays can earn your respect.
That respect begins by paying attention to your surroundings. Like me, you may already have zoomed past such displays for years without noticing the splendor. You’re likely so focused on the road ahead, as you should be, that the surroundings slip by unnoticed. You’re missing out. Once in a while, when a drive takes you through the countryside, leave extra early so you can drive leisurely and look around a bit.
You’ll begin to notice that the flowers are there – waiting for you, already flaunting their flamboyant personalities. Sometimes they sweep across expansive fields, other times they form simple but pleasing arrangements. They’re perhaps big enough to fill a ballroom but sometimes small enough for a reception room; their displays are small enough to escape your attention unless you look for them.
They can come from a wide variety of floral classes. Some suffer under the weed classification, awaiting eradication if in a suburban yard but extracting exclamations of surprise when covering a field in brilliant yellow blooms that color contrast the intense blue sky. This “Jekyll and Hyde” flower is, of course, the dandelion. Although its masses of yellow can be inspiring, the individual bloom seldom invites admiration. But where its blossom fails, its seed head succeeds. The teetering shredded seeds clinging to the head by tiny feet have long attracted admiration and drawn in lips to puff away and send them on a distant wind-blown journey.
Our respect for flowers rises highest for those that make decorative bouquets. Daisies, lilies, asters, lupines even Queen Anne’s lace qualify for this purpose (although picking native wildflowers is generally a legal no-no).
Perhaps the least respected flowers are those so tiny they aren’t even noticed, not even known for producing flowers. Chief among these are the grasses. Many of us don’t know that grasses produce flowers. I had to Google it to be sure. In mass, especially when sprinkled with an early morning dew, they shimmer and wink to produce beautiful hue gradations that would challenge a paint swatch rack at Home Depot or the palette of Pollock, the abstract artist. In the right environment, on rolling hills with gentle swales, grasses can produce subtly spectacular landscapes.
Sometimes all these varieties come together to form the most natural and classical of the non-forested Finger Lakes landscape: the meadow. The subtlety of meadows can be so pervasive that they escape your attention. They certainly can’t be classified as a super bloom, raucous and rambling across fields, screaming out color that almost defy definition. Meadows are the opposite – whisperers, introverts, happy to hide behind the crowd-loving brown-eyed Susan or to be dwarfed by Queen Anne’s lace or to huddle beneath the soon to be towering and dominating golden rods.
Meadows are best appreciated on back road drives where you can pull over and ponder the collection of plants before you. Chicory brushes your car as you pull onto the shoulder. Look past the ditch. Buttercups and clovers crowd the front where they can get sun. There’s yellow hawksbeard a few feet further in. Over there, a small gathering of butterfly weed thrives as only it can in a dry and gravelly spot. And soon to show their buds are the early asters beginning to bud with the shortening days.
One of the drawbacks of finding flower landscapes in the Finger Lakes is that many are temporary. They’re unlikely to persevere from one year to the next, leaving you to start anew each succeeding year. Some of the flowers that seem able to quickly cover an empty field include dandelions, Queen Anne’s lace, wild mustard (yellow) and golden rod. Because many of them take over abandoned or resting farm fields, sooner or later they succumb to the plow. One of the more predictable and long-lasting blooms is the July explosion of orange tiger day lilies that line back roads throughout the central lakes but especially along Cayuga and Keuka. They return year after year, often in the same locations.
If you decide you’d like to see large fields of wildflowers, approach your quest casually and with low expectations. Their appearance can be fickle, ablaze one year, doused the next. That’s the way it is with most large blooms around the world. It may help to hit some high roads with distant views that reveal several miles of fields. But always scan your surroundings and keep an eye open for the small vignettes of flower displays that often occur right beside the road.
