Nashville Mustard is blooming!
Want to Meet the Mustard?
Psyched for the superboom?
Wondering why this small flower is a big deal,
and what I mean by “Trace of the Trace?”
Drop by Fort Negley between 11am and 1pm on Saturday, March 8 and 29th to find out. And keep reading…
Here’s an update from our Meet the Mustard event from March 1:
Continue reading “Meet the Mustard: Nashville’s Superbloom”
Keen to see Nashville Mustard while it lasts? It only blooms a few weeks each spring, and now’s the time. Why go see it? It’s yellow and gorgeous, it’s a mini superbloom, it’s a good photo op, and a true native. Think of it as a remnant of our historic grasslands, or as I like to imagine: a trace of the Trace. Trace, as in buffalo roads, when bison travelled to the salt lick that “made” Nashville (near what is now Bicentennial Mall.)
This post is to show where the Mustard is, so you can visit your nearest site, or go see them all.
And, it’s a happy update to last year’s post about Cutting the Mustard…
Every March, Nashville Mustard shines from old lawns at a handful of Metro Parks. The plant is a true Nashville native: an endemic wildflower that only happens in a few counties. And when it happens in blankets of bright yellow, it is glorious. It’s a Nashville Superbloom.
And then every March, the mowers come.
I worry if the plants had time to set enough seeds to make a blanket the next year, and the next.
Nashville Mustard (Paysonia lescurii) is sort of a secret. Who’s heard of it? And why should we care? You can’t even buy it, because no nursery anywhere sells the plants or the seeds.
I vote we make it a Thing. A Good Nashville Thing. It could be nonpartisan PR that anyone could celebrate.
At the very least, it could be an annual Social Media Superbloom Photo-op. And a reason to learn why “native matters.” Nashville Mustard is a piece of old Nashville: really old, like when the buffalo roamed.
Much of our part of Tennessee was grassland, where “the combination of grazing, browsing, and trampling by large herbivores maintained short stature grasslands in which endemic plants such as … Paysonia … evolved.”*
Buffalo were the first mowers of Nashville Mustard, but our lawnmowers may the be last.
Continue reading “Cutting the Mustard”[This is a post from 2017. For the newest Nashville Mustard post, see “Meet the Mustard” (link)]
There are swaths of yellow right now in Elmington Park: small yellow blooms massed in the lawn. I hope the city doesn’t mow soon, because the yellow is Nashville mustard—our mustard—and it needs to go to seed and spread. I saw it on the way to Hebrew School, and as soon as I could, I went back and parked the car in the lot, then parked my body flat on the grass.
SIDEWALK NATURE 