Funding for wildflowers with Helen Hayes is provided by a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, with additional funding provided by the bill Barrett Foundation Fund of the Communities Foundation of Texas.

The Temple Inland Family of companies, including Guaranty Federal Bank and Temple Inland Forest Products Corporation, and by Stearns Miracle-Gro products, bringing the joy of gardening to generations of Americans.

It makes me so happy to get up in the morning and come out here and wander.

They're one of nature's great gifts.

Splashed along the roadside, clinging to a cliff nestled among the grasses, gracing a sandy dune.

On this earth, wildflowers herald springtime and the rebirth of a cycle that frames the events of our lives.

Petals and stems, pistils and stamens.

Orange.

Red.

Violet.

Blue.

Pink and yellow.

Sometimes alone, sometimes not.

Hello, I'm Helen Hayes.

Most of my life has been spent playing out the dramas of our lives on stage inside a theater.

But I'm also aware of the magnificent drama of the world.

The natural world around us.

In 1982, my friend Lady Bird Johnson approached me with her idea of starting a research center to study and to promote the use of wildflowers.

She was 70, and I was 81, and I thought, well, why not?

Let's go for it.

So we did.

And that association has been one of the happiest and the most joyful experiences of my life.

And I've learned a lot about wildflowers.

These blooming native plants are romantic and beautiful to look at.

But they're also vital to a healthy ecosystem.

They interact with other plants to build up the soil, prevent erosion, and provide oxygen to the atmosphere.

Flowers are the reproductive organs of a plant.

Fertilization takes place when hungry birds, bees, and butterflies seeking sweet nectar convey pollen from one plant to another.

This is the Texas Hill Country.

The heart of this far flung state.

A region thick with wildflower diversity and home to Lady Bird Johnson.

I just enjoy everything that I see with my eyes.

Belongs to me and feeds me.

And gives me a pleasure.

It's getting so now, when I'm out in the country and see a pretty sight, I just wonder and how long will you be here?

Pretty wild things.

This field is very full of mesquite trees.

One of my favorites because in the early spring they are just the palest of pale green.

It just always surprises me and fills me with delight.

The flowers that you see are the phlox drummondii.

All of this country is full of phlox.

Dark sort of ruby red.

And this pink slightly bluish pink.

Every now and then you see a few Indian paint.

You'll see the.

They're lovely sister tailed flycatcher swooping down, particularly if it were twilight.

One of the early things are the bluebonnets.

And then the precious little pink evening primrose.

Later on the changing waves of Indian blanket are guillardia and then the coreopsis.

Its pleasant to watch the seasons march and just gives me a sense of a peace and continuity and at home with my world.

When she married Lyndon Johnson, Lady Bird learned to mix her love for the land with politics.

And ultimately as First Lady of our country.

She understood the influence she could have, and here she began.

They called it beautification.

Too bad about that word.

Kind of a prissy word, but we never could come up with one better.

During her white House tenure, Lady Bird Johnson brought a new awareness to the environment.

Long before it became a popular trend.

Oh, a lot of people thought it was.

It was cosmetic and no need to get mad.

Something beats nothing and it goes a lot deeper than cosmetics.

So one thing leads to another.

In the most miraculous sort of a way, when you get interested in in one thread of this very mixed up skein of ecology, you go on to another thing.

And she did go on after her years in the white House.

Lady bird continued her efforts in conservation and restoration.

In 1982, she founded the National Wildflower Research Center.

Come on, John Everett is research director.

Come.

We've put these cattle in here as a management technique, and they will graze down the existing grass, expose the soil so new seeds can germinate.

Then we can restore that grassland to some sort of original health.

And that's kind of what we're doing.

We hear a lot about endangered species, but more important than that, we have entire systems that are vanishing.

Our wetland systems are highly threatened.

Our prairie communities are being lost.

And so the idea was simply to learn enough about these plants so that we could grow them in some predictable way.

And reestablish those plants into altered communities.

If we want them.

We'll keep them.

And if we don't, they will go the way of many changes in the world from loss of habitat.

Across the prairies, wetlands were down a sandy coastline.

Each species of wildflower finds its own ecological niche.

Variations in topography, soil type, rainfall and temperature combined to give the United States over 20,000 species of wildflowers.

The best way to appreciate these plants to truly understand their beauty, is to behold them in their natural habitats.

These precious pockets of wildness, where the splendor, vigor and variety of life have escaped destruction.

This is East Texas, Piney woods, eerie swamps, ancient cypress trees, a sense of time hangs heavy here.

This is a region known as the Big Thicket, a national preserve.

Howard Peacock lifetime resident, is a part of this place.

I love the mystery and love the intrigue of nature.

That's part of my love affair with the Big Thicket.

The way that I have found most delightful is just to strike out and start walking in the woods.

Keep my eyes open, keep my ears open.

Notice what's happening around me.

And it's.

There's something different happening every day.

Hey, there's a good one up there.

Let's go up here.

The pitcher plant likes a C.P.

Area.

Now, isn't that just a work of art?

Look, this is a leaf that this plant has modified to gather food and here is the collar.

Here that exudes the fragrance that attracts insects.

They'll slip down into the tube.

And that's where they're digested.

At the bottom.

Incidentally, in North America, there are five genera of carnivorous plants, and four of them thrive in the big Thicket.

The showiest of the four is the yellow pitcher plant.

You'll notice that the flowers are not on the same stalk as the tube.

See what last year's meals look like for this little dude here.

Here's residue of some of its victims.

The bones of yesteryear.

The name, scientific name for this plant.

If you want to look it up in the books, that it sounds like a chic's favorite belly dancers.

Name Sarracenia alata.

Isn't that a wonderful name?

Big thicket annually gets about 50in of rainfall.

That's the lifeblood of all of this great panoply of plants.

Plant life here.

And the wildlife that results from there being such a diversity of plant life and diversity is necessary to our livelihood.

If a plant species or an animal species disappears from the face of the earth, if it goes extinct, that means that in order for that plant or that animal to occur again, the entire world would have to start over at the very beginning.

Just look at this one little patch here.

We've got calippo orchids back here.

The fern here, that's regal.

Fern is one of the oldest plants on the earth that has retained its original form.

And then growing right with it is the pitcher plant, which is one of the most recent plants on the evolutionary scale.

And then completing the bouquet, we have a. Colic root plant.

So they make a nice little neighborhood for each other.

Nature is honest and direct and poetic in the process.

A refreshment to the spirit always.

That's integrity.

That is superb.

Integrity.

That's what I love about it.

From this damp realm, thick with life across the state, lies the Chihuahuan Desert.

Sparse, arid, with plenty of space for each life form.

The Rio Grande courses through this land, leaving behind a great jagged slice through the earth.

The region is known as Big Bend.

Much of it is a national park.

Jim Bones is a photographer.

Wilderness guide, and teacher.

The river is the symbol of life, and it's in a very real physical way.

The center toward which all things flow.

The big bend gets its name from the big Bend in the Rio Grande that occurs as it swings south, and then north, and then south again on its way to the Gulf of Mexico.

Cradled within that big bend are the Chisos Mountains.

This gives the area such a diversity because of the altitudinal changes.

I think it it's called something that I point out to my students is the fact that when they take a picture of a wide landscape, they also need to move in, close on that.

Because nature reveals herself in the details.

The difference in the photographic arts and the other arts, which are mostly the art of inclusion, is that photography is the art of exclusion.

You have the infinite world around you, which seems chaotic, and you have to find that one place where you frame what significant.

We're going to get in there close.

Okay.

But it's that process of looking and the process of living, which is really most important.

This is a primrose here.

This is something called purple mat or nama because of the great diversity of environments that you find in Big Bend, you also find quite a variety of wildflowers.

In the cacti are probably the most famous of the flowers.

You find in the desert.

Prickly pear cactus and the cactus in general have a particular strategy in which they have very small leaves, which you almost never see.

The big pads are actually in large stems, which have a waxy coating on them.

This enables them to conserve a great deal of water in a good wet year.

You will find the entire plant covered with blossoms, in which time you can actually hear the sound of the bees.

As you approach them.

In drier year, they will make fewer blossoms and conserve their water more.

The ocotillo is an example of that same kind of strategy in which, in an ordinary year, they will produce flowers first, and then if there's enough water, they will leaf out and put down more roots for the storage of water.

And sugar.

The strawberry cactus or pitaya, forms great mounds in many places, usually in the gravelly foothills of the Chisos Mountains.

Claret cup cactus are more commonly found at the edge of the woodlands.

They tend to prefer the higher elevations.

Some of the other things that you might find are the beautiful, tall, Big Bend Bluebonnet.

Lupines have evolved to particularly clever kind of strategy in order to get their pollen spread from plant to plant by the bees, which come to seek the nectar in them.

They have a structure inside the flower which puts the pollen on the bottom of the bee whenever it lands.

So it's not able to get away with the free lunch.

Here it has to do the work of the flower in order to get the nectar.

The bluebonnets originally developed the ability to move into disturbed areas such as along arroyos from flash flooding, overgrazed areas of tremendous erosion.

But they are valuable not only for their beauty but because of the fact that they are holding the soil in place and allowing the earth to begin to heal itself.

And though we will never be able to restore the land to what was here when we first came, we can rehabilitate it and we can bring it back to a healthy state in which both the land and the people who live on it can remain in harmony.

Little wilderness remains.

We've plowed up the meadows, fenced in the prairies, paved over the marshes, and flattened the dunes.

But not all is lost.

Many of these altered environments can be revitalized.

What we hope to do is to encourage the use of our native indigenous wildflowers.

Native shrubs, native trees, and our planned landscaping of the country so as to preserve them so as to keep the regional face of America.

You know, even if you have a very traditional, exotic yard as things die, you might just want to put in something that normally grows around here.

So that's kind of easy.

Step one of how to put in native plants.

Now, we think about so many of the environmental problems.

You're either depending upon some kind of legislation or group action or somebody else to do something or some of these almost seem like you can't do anything.

But this is an activity in which we all can participate.

Ladies, don't forget, if you want to do fall planting now, October is the ideal month, but you can plant up to and including the first week in November as well.

If you put the plants that are appropriate for that area, then they don't require supplemental watering.

They generally are more resistant to pests, and so you don't need so much of the pesticides that then causes additional problems in the runoff.

In our streams, lakes and water supplies.

Now that you've got the seed down, we need to rake it, work it down into the soil so there'll be good soil contact with those hard seed coats.

So rake it down in back and forth.

Everyone seems to think that a yard should be very regular.

Looking in town.

Everything's green and I think that's quite boring.

And I was hoping not to have to do much lawn maintenance and watering and so on.

So we just went with the native stuff and these are all perennials, so they all come back and it's just fun to see how everything changes.

I don't use insecticides.

I don't use pesticides, I don't use herbicides.

This is just how it's supposed to be.

And you have it's fun to fun to be happy with that and see what see what conscientious neglect will do.

And I guess that's what a wildflower garden is, is conscientious neglect.

Cities, parks and corporations are also catching on to conscientious neglect.

They purchased seed and bulk produced at Wildflower farms like this one.

This on the left is Drummond phlox.

The world crop of that seed is probably less than a thousand pounds.

So we're bringing it back into cultivation because it is such a popular plant.

Now, if you wanted to achieve that type of color and went to the nursery and bought these plants in, say, space them at one foot centers, what would you spend on a on an acre?

You would spend in an excess of $170,000 to achieve this type of color that you can do in seed for $50.

So now you understand why seeding is coming back.

We're talking clients that we go in and plant over ten acres.

A lot of corporate headquarters have these large meadows, and that means a lot of grass.

And I think once we understand that, you can replace that with this type of color and save ten mowings.

And by saving those ten mowings, you've almost paid for the seed, it almost works itself out economically.

Don't have to worry about a sprinkler system.

Forget about that expense.

We planted about six acres of wildflowers in a water savings alone.

It's about 3 million gallons of water, which a dollar amount is about $6,100.

And it also saved us about $1,000 in mowing costs each year.

So the program has really already paid for itself.

So we're real pleased with that fact.

The biggest wildflower gardener in the country is the Texas Highway Department.

For them, landscaping with wildflowers helps reduce mowing costs as much as $8 million a year.

Highways destroy millions of acres of natural environments across the country.

However, more and more highway departments are learning that native plants can help restore this damaged land.

A healthy wildflower habitat just happens to be part of our whole system.

Vegetation management system, wildflowers by themselves aren't effective if you just.

Had grasses, you'd have to utilize fertilizer to maintain them.

But by using the plant community of both wildflowers and grasses and all the plants in between, then we create what Mother Nature is trying to create anyway.

The common conception is that we inherited this earth from our forefathers, when in fact we're just born it from our children.

And that's I think that's what it's all about.

We've got to preserve it.

Wildflowers remind us that we cannot take from the earth without giving back.

There is a Comanche legend that tells such a story.

Great spirits, the land is dying.

Your people are dying to.

For three days.

The Comanche people danced and waited.

What must we do?

They cried to bring life giving rain a little girl sitting alone watched the dancers and explain to her beloved warrior doll.

The shaman is alone on the hill, listening for word from the great spirits.

When he returns, we will know what to do.

The people had named her.

She who is alone and cared for her.

During these hard times.

Her own family, taken by the famine, seemed like shadows lengthening in the setting sun.

Her mother, who had made the buckskin doll and painted its face with a juice of berries.

Her father, who had decorated the head with brilliant feathers from the bird that calls Jay jay Jay.

She loved her doll very much.

The shaman is returning, cried a runner, and the people gathered round.

The shaman spoke.

The great spirits say the people have become selfish.

We have taken from the earth without giving back.

We must make a burnt offering of the most valued possession among us.

She who is alone held her doll close to her heart.

It is you, the great spirits want.

She whispered, and returned to her teepee to wait.

The night outside was still soon.

Everyone was asleep, but she who is alone, she picked up the one stick that glowed in the campfire.

Stars filled the sky, but there was no moon.

As she ran to the shaman's hill.

Oh great spirits, she prayed.

Please accept my warrior doll.

Then, gathering twigs, she started a fire.

She thought of her family, of all the people of her mother and father.

There, suffering their hunger.

And before she could change her mind, she thrust her doll into the fire.

And watched until the ashes grew cold.

Then, scooping up a handful, she who is alone, scattered them to the home of the winds, then fell asleep until morning.

When she looked out, there were the ashes had fallen.

The hills were covered with beautiful blue flowers, blue as the feathers of the bird, who cries.

Jay, jay, jay.

A warm rain began to fall, and the people gathered to thank the great spirits and the land began to live again.

I feel guilty cutting these, you know.

They're so happy where they are and they serve me such so well with such joy.

God bless them and bring me more next year and every year that I'm here, my wildflowers.

Funding for wildflowers with Helen Hayes was provided by a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, with additional funding provided by the Bill Barrett Foundation Fund of the Communities Foundation of Texas.

The Temple Inland Family of companies, including Guaranty Federal Bank and Temple Inland Forest Products Corporation, and by Stearns Miracle-Gro products, bringing the joy of gardening to generations of Americans.

This is PBS.