Perspicacious Poppies
A Rewilding Story
In the fall, I planted a few thousand native wildflower seeds in my Utah backyard. I gave them a pep talk in their little brown packet, then roughed up the dirt with a rake. Using my best impression of wild abandon, I threw them onto the prepped earth like Miss Rumphius, and gently tucked them all in under a bed of leaves.
I wanted to walk in the footsteps of some of our past Constant Wonder guests, like Rebecca McMackin or Thor Hanson. Saving the world one backyard at a time!
Several weeks passed after the planting of the seeds.
I went to Florida for Thanksgiving for some serious brisket-eating and beach-sitting. Meanwhile, my delightful, kind-hearted, septuagenarian neighbor came and raked my yard. He raked and raked.
All. The. Leaves.
When I got home, it was a heart-sick feeling to see the clean yard. I thanked my neighbor profusely while something inside me died a little. I assumed that every seed had ended up in the greenwaste bin. (I hold out hope that somewhere in a giant compost heap there’s a riot of wildflowers blooming like crazy.)
Given what we will now call The Great Leaf Raking of 2025, I was not surprised to see zero wildflowers growing in my yard this spring.
But I was even more surprised when I finally walked around my dilapidated shed to a little patch of neglected dirt that I forget exists most of the time. Mixed in the middle of a miserable holly bush, a handful of wild poppies was coming up in the bitter, dry, and disappointing earth along my fence.
Look at this poppy!
How does a flower do that?
Can you imagine being thrown onto the ground, covered, roughed-up, over-wintered and then months later feeling the sun and thinking, here I go. Time to grow!
That’s not really what happens to me in similar circumstances. I tend to turn inward, stop blooming, huddle inside myself.
Since we met Martha Barnette on the podcast some weeks ago, I can’t stop thinking about Latin roots whenever I see a flower—or a complicated word. I chose perspicacious for the title of this essay for a reason. The Latin root for perspicacious means “clear-sighted.”
In that picture, you can see a clear-sighted poppy understanding the subtleties of life. A poppy that is going to take the hard, brown dirt and grow anyway, sowing awe and wonder in the same ground that grows disappointment. Without dulling the shocking red of its petals one bit.