A patch of tall lousewort can occupy me for any portion of an hour. It takes that long to check each flower. Twice.
Such methodical and redundant inspection of each flower on a plant that may bear several dozen flowers detracts neither from the occasion nor from the wildflower because in that moment it is the occasion and because it is a special kind of beauty.
Wildflowers present beauty to us in no fewer than three ways.
Color and structure greet us as visual beauty; they are the calling card that introduces a wildflower to us.
Fragrance impresses us as olfactory beauty; it is a seductive charm that encourages us to pay attention to what our noses are telling us.
Connectedness presents us with intellectual beauty; to know the story of how a plant lives and dies and in so doing connects with other life is the most stunning beauty of all.
A dozen experiences delivered this message to me before I comprehended the lesson.
The first came with a mentor who predicted the presence of a bird by viewing a meadow of wildflowers. A particularly abundant pollinator of the plant's flowers is also a favorite food of the bird. Thus to find the wildflower is to find the bird. And we did.
As a kid I had read of ants tending aphids, but I did not interpret the aphids as livestock nor the plants on which the aphids live as livestock food until I encountered a sunflower patch in which individual sunflower stalks were darkened with herds of aphids and their cowgirl ants.
I was in college before I read how female pronuba moths gather pollen in one yucca flower then move it to another yucca flower where they place it on the pistil before laying their eggs, from which hatch tiny caterpillars that eat the seeds developing from that original pollen transfer. One day, amidst countless yucca blooms, I searched for this moth. And found it.
Hiking one moonlit night, I heard a crackling from a chokecherry thicket. Repeated visits finally revealed that thrushes and robins ate the ripe chokecherry fruits then while roosting in the trees to process their meals passed the cherry pits, which northern rock mice collected and chewed open to get the seed. That was the crackling I had originally heard.
Photographing wallflowers introduced me to the yellow crab-spider. An antipollinator, it hides in flowers or flower clusters and captures various insects that visit the flowers expecting a meal of nectar or pollen. Though the yellow crab-spider intercepts would-be pollinators, it clambers around the flowers enough to spread a little pollen on its own.
The point about actually watching wildflowers brings me back to louseworts.
In their book "Colorado Flora: Eastern Slope," William Weber and Ronald Wittmann wrote: "[Louseworts] have developed such complicated flowers that potential pollinators either cannot reach the nectar or become so impatient that they bite a hole through the base of the corolla, bypassing the stamens and style completely and canceling the whole adaptation."
This motivated me to search the lousewort blossoms to determine which kinds of insects and whether they were chewing their ways in or chewing their ways out. And I'm still watching.
This is the best wildflower summer we've had in a decade. Take advantage of it. Engage the plants; watch the wildflowers. You'll personally discover a whole new kind of beauty.
Kevin J. Cook is a freelance writer and naturalist based in Loveland. His Wildlife Window column appears in the Reporter-Herald every Thursday.