Wild about flowers? Join the bunch

Wildflowers are now everywhere.

And they're lip-smacking good to eat, says Roger Flaum, a wild-plant forager and teacher of all things plants.

Flaum is a transplanted Queens guy and now retired Orange County middle school teacher who batters and fries the orange daylilies you see almost everywhere.

“The nice thing about the orange daylilies is you can stuff them with garlic and ricotta, crumbs and chopped mushrooms, wrap them up and fry them,” says Flaum. “The roots of the plant you can dig up, and they've got little tubers like miniature potatoes you can also fry.”

His list of what's-good-for-you-about-flowers and other plants is long.

“Red clover is edible, and they're pulling a chemical out of that that fights breast cancer. And red clover makes an excellent tea when blooming. Pull the heads off, dry them and make tea.”

Flaum adds this: “Warning! When I'm teaching about these plants, I tell people you've got to be 100 percent sure about the plant, that it's what you think it is. Some are poisonous ..."

My absolute favorites are the orange daylilies that seem to be taking over the world.

Wildflowers are childhood friends and welcomed guests, which is why children learn about them early from rhymes and sayings.

The “Ring around the rosie” game is one, and who can forget the ditty, “Roses are red, violets are blue, and I love you!”

Wildflowers are simply fascinating. You could do worse than spending a few minutes with a plant.

Marvel at the glorious array of flower power colors – dazzling oranges, deep purples, yellows like the sun – in gardens. Go online, or open a book and read about wildflowers. Just like people, plants all have riveting personal histories.

You could spend an easy half hour with the very common, several-feet-tall, furry-leafed great mullein, with lovely small yellow flowers.

All kinds of insects crawl around this plant of roadsides. It's medicinal cures are legion and were known in ancient times.

We're rich in flowers, says Debbie Lester, master gardener and community horticulture educator at Cornell Cooperative Extension.

She's an example of flower power.

“When I grew up, my mother always had a garden,” she says. It rubbed off. “Most kids,” she says, “are impressed by masses of flowers.”

One mass of kid-favorite blooms bursting gloriously right now is flowering milkweeds.

This plant is critical food for our threatened monarch butterflies, whose lives as crop and flower pollinators are vital to our web of life. These incredible creatures are threatened by pesticides.

Flowers are also a seasonal calendar to the passage of our time on earth.

Pressed flowers are bookmarks in many a yearbook and diary.

And they remind us of the passage of time.

It's summer when those lowly little blue flowers called chicory pop up along roads. They stick with us from June to October.

And for a lifetime, children's songs about flowers never seem to fade. Such as this springtime ditty about daffodils that's a charming bit of nonsense we could all do with a lot more.

“Daffy down dilly/Has come to town/In a yellow petticoat/And a green gown.”

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