Magical Yellowtops

Yellowtops at Indian Bayou

The state wildflower of Louisiana is the Louisiana iris, and who, having seen her purple petals in person, would deny her celebrity status? Some even trace the roots of the fleur-de-lis symbol, so central to Louisiana’s mythology, back to a wild iris, fittingly, and not a lily. And the spectrum of her petals befits her grandeur, too: purple, purple-red, purple-black, purple-blue. Horticulturists create hybrids in her honor. But this is a story about another Louisiana wildflower. She isn’t an official anything. In fact, she’s a lowly weed.

Though she lacks the noble lineage of her royal purple sister, she’s charming in her own regard. You don’t have to go hunting for this bright yellow beauty. Whereas the iris cultivates mystery, her little yellow sister stands right out in the open, spraying her golden color across entire cane fields at the height of her season. In the Atchafalaya Basin she can stretch for miles and miles. Which is why, of course, she’s so easy to overlook: in spring she is simply everywhere.

Yet most people couldn’t tell you her name. Her fragrance isn’t particularly memorable, and while she’s undeniably gorgeous, if you’ve seen one, you’ve pretty much seen them all. Always the same bright butter-yellow florets; the same stout celery-green stalks. You won’t ever find her in a garden, at least not on purpose, or showcased in a terra cotta pot. She’s too much of a wild weed for that, preferring to sprout up unbidden, like clockwork, in colonies of breathtaking size.

Packera glabella

And she loves being muddy. In fact, the wetter the better. She’s literally the lowliest of weeds. But zoom out from those ditches and those low swampy places, and you’ll see how this punctual wildflower more than rises to the occasion, keying right into the cycle of the seasons to play a pivotal role in the economy of Louisiana while tapping into a larger form of alchemy.

Her botanical name is Packera glabella, and she’s a member of the aster family; succulent and totally herbaceous. In other words, as tall as she grows—four or even five feet tall—she never turns woody. You couldn’t imagine a more confection-like wildflower if you piped out a fluted log of kelly-green icing, put a yellow pom-pom at the top of it and squeezed out thirteen tiny slender yellow petals. Her bright green stalks are hollow and vertically ribbed, letting her be light and erect, and as the plant grows taller and taller, the stalk grows thicker and more purple toward the base; larger lyre-shaped leaves go from green to dark purple, and the whole effect of the wild plant as she grows is to lift the cheery clusters of yellow flowers skyward, sturdy and unbending in the breeze.

The wildflower is called butterweed in some parts of the country. Around here, you might hear her called yellowtops, if you hear her called anything at all. She comes into her season anonymous and golden, much earlier than other spring wildflowers—as early as early December some years, even as the rust-colored bald cypress leaves are only finally falling. This timing is the key to her magic. Showing up early, she gets a head start on the competition, staking her claim across any available space, thriving in both sunshine and shade as long as she is moist.

Yellowtops in a cane field

In terms of total bio-mass, Packera glabella is easily the most plentiful wildflower in the Atchafalaya Basin in late winter and early spring, and when the floods roll in, as they inevitably do, at the moment of her maximum vibrance, her low-lying habitats are the first to fill with water. This is when the magic happens. All that submerged vegetation, yellow and purple and celery-green, begins to decay and decompose just as new generations of wild crawfish are crawling out from their eggs, triggered by the arrival of fresh water. Crawfish love those low-lying habitats, too, and they love to eat the wildflowers with whom they share a fertile space; the crawfish grow plumper and plumper.

This humble yellow flower, workhorse of the spring, in returning her plant matter to the earth, achieves with her annual drowning a delicious rebirth. She takes sunlight, adds water, and turns it into crawfish. Then she disappears until December, when she does it all over again. I’d love to see an iris try that.