Bluebonnets Awe-Inspiring for Texans : Wildflowers: Roadside picture-taking is a springtime ritual. There are more than 1 million acres of beauty.

It is a special time in Texas right now--time to get all dressed up, lie down in a field of bluebonnets and say, “Cheese.”

Any newcomer to the state will be struck these April afternoons by the sight of all the roadside picture-taking: little girls in lace-frosted dresses and sparkling tiaras implored by their grandmothers to smile, young women lounging among the blooms as their boyfriends preside over the camera, a 1957 Chevy framed in a field of blue, a red Corvette, a Springer spaniel named Peaches. All are getting the bluebonnet treatment.

During the flowers’ brief, memorable reign, people across central Texas happily indulge in this mid-April ritual. Sixty-year-olds recall posing in Sunday-best outfits as youngsters; family albums are filled with annual bluebonnet shots, as predictable as the annual photographs around the Christmas tree. Joshua Needham, for one, has been doing it “forever.” He is 10.

“Every year, I go out in the bluebonnets,” he said, “and my parents put me down with my brother and my sister. One year, they made us sit on a blanket and pretend to be having tea. We used my sister’s china tea set. It was corny, but I enjoyed it.”

Every other fourth-grader at the Regents School in Austin said he or she, too, has been forced by grown-ups to frolic in the bluebonnets.

There is unquestionably a festive air along Texas roadways now, and even the most die-hard skeptic, who might have wondered whether the state’s ubiquitous bluebonnet postcards were perhaps a little doctored to enhance their beauty, has to admit the view is glorious.

Fields and pastures, shoulders and medians, front lawns left natural to accommodate the wildflowers, seem brush-stroked in royal blue. The bluebonnets have a magical quality--illuminated in the electrified light before a storm, shimmering on clear evenings under a big Texas moon--and people here respond with an attitude that is almost reverential.

“We always say we have the largest flower show on Earth in the springtime,” said John R. Thomas, whose Wildseed Farms Inc. in Eagle Lake and Fredericksburg is the largest company in the United States that harvests and sells wildflower seeds.

“It’s fun to see somebody from Ohio send a picture of 5,000 square foot of flowers in a meadow and, bless their hearts, they say, ‘This is more flowers than we’ve seen in our lives.’ Well, they need to come on down to Texas. If a Texan drives by a 10-acre field of bluebonnets, he goes, ‘Yeah, that’s nice,’ and keeps going. People from out of state will slam on the brakes for a few flowers in a ditch, but Texans want to see hundreds of acres of color.”

Texas has, in fact, more than 1 million roadside acres tended regularly by a team of state Department of Transportation engineers, landscapers and gardeners, a tradition that began in 1930. That was when a highway engineer proposed a program for preserving the state’s plant life, said Jack Lowry, who edits the department’s popular Texas Highways magazine--the April issue of which is always devoted to full-color spreads of the spring bounty.

In recent years, there has developed a gentle backlash against those who stubbornly persist in posing among the blooms--and then try to interest others in their artwork. Michael Murphy, photo editor of Texas Highways, reports he is deluged with “all kinds of letters and photographs from readers, who just know we would love to publish their loved ones in the bluebonnets. But if we ever published just one, the floodgates would open.”