Queen of summer

I wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago about Queen Anne's lace. My favorite wildflower. In this picture I took at my husband's family's farm, where the flower is stretching west into the setting sun, you can see the gentle light reflecting off the flower and creating a soft glow that reminds me of a halo. What a majestic flower, named for a queen and so snowy white that a crown actually adorns its dome-shaped blossom. The queen of summer...

Most people consider it a weed. Are wildflowers weeds? If you mean that they grow without your permission, then of course--wild foliage, by nature, needs no human prompting to grace the landscape with its unkempt beauty. But if weeds are unsightly, nuisances, then what is weed-like about a peaceful flower, growing in its own habitat and disturbing no one except we humans in our symmety-seeking, manipulative landscaping states. Does Queen Anne's lace grow up at the margins of your yard? Is she out of control? No matter what you do, you cannot banish her. Because she was here long before you were. This mountain landscape is hers to abide in and to decorate and to own. And can't you see--her woody-stemmed, waist-high beauty far outsurpasses that of the weakling pansies that you grow in your straw-carpeted flower bed, easily crushed under the foot of a stray dog--unnaturally placed and trying to flourish in a balance of colors that is perfect in your constructing mind, though it is not what nature ever intended.

If you've ever seen a field of wildflowers, various sizes and colors and shapes all melding into one ever-flowing image, you have seen nature's perfection at work. Something about the completely unplanned mix, the clump of wild pansies here that slowly mixes and gives way to the clover, the milkweed clusters that shoot up between the Queen Anne's lace and accent her snowy whiteness with their burnt orange... No human mind could have constructed that asymmetrical perfection. Scarcely a human eye can spot its overwhelming attractiveness through the preliminary appearance of uncontrolled wildness, of random splashes of color on the blank canvas of the meadow that may first seem like a mess, but when you unleash your heart you see a masterpiece.