The drive into Cuero through its farm-to-market roads is carpeted with Texas’ best treasures: wildflowers. Bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes are the most prevalent, but soft pink evening primrose and fuchsia winecups spill over fence lines and into roadsides. Looking out over the fields of color, it’s difficult to imagine that just years before, the flowers were at risk of disappearing.
The seat of largely rural DeWitt County, population 20,000, is many things. Sandwiched midway between San Antonio and the Gulf Coast, Cuero proclaims itself to be the Turkey Capital of the World for its early 1900s turkey parades, when poultry growers would drive upward of 20,000 birds through town on their way to the slaughterhouse. Cuero also sits atop the Eagle Ford Shale, the second largest shale field in the country, which facilitated a fracking boom in 2010 and is currently seeing an uptick in production. And since the turn of the century, the town has held the state Legislature’s designation as the Wildflower Capital of Texas—of the more than 5,000 species of wildflowers in the state, DeWitt County offers about 1,000.
“This county at one time was an international attraction,” says Frank Klein, a nature photographer whose family has owned land in DeWitt County for generations.
Former Cuero mayor Sara Post-Meyer remembers when a high schooler wrote to the state Legislature in 1999 requesting the title of Wildflower Capital of Texas. This resulted in a visit from wildflower champion Lady Bird Johnson, who was known for her program that encouraged the scattering of wildflower seeds onto America’s—and specifically Texas’—roadsides. Due to the flowers’ popularity, in the ’90s a group of locals formed the DeWitt County Wildflower Association to promote the care and preservation of the flowers.
“The Wildflower Association did a really good job of educating the county residents to preserve wildflowers that were on their property because of their importance for butterflies, for bees, and for their natural beauty,” Post-Meyer says.
The association grew the tourism industry in Cuero, drawing people to the heritage museum to view hundreds of specimens that designated “pickers”—Post-Meyer was one herself—collected on early spring mornings. They’d then drive busloads of tourists along county roads, guiding their way to the most scenic spots.
But around 2000, the Wildflower Association began to wind down as its members aged, and with it, the momentum of flower conservation in the area. Ten years later, the Eagle Ford Shale fracking boom descended on the county, changing its landscape forever. “When I became mayor in 2010, our little community of about 8,000 was definitely overwhelmed,” Post-Meyer recalls. “It was just an unbelievable change.” Johnson grass began to choke out many of the native flowers as a result of the now heavily trafficked roads. “It was like a gold rush,” Klein recalls. “At a stoplight, they would have 16-wheelers backed up for a mile.” It took years of effort by locals in the last decade to resurrect the flower population through reseeding, ushering in a reinvigorated era for the Wildflower Capital.
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These fields of blooms aren’t just pretty—they play a key role in staving off mass pollinator extinction, which affects our food system, explains Andrea DeLong-Amaya, director of horticulture at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin. They also “help with erosion control, sequester carbon in the soil, and help to purify the air we breathe.” Unfortunately, they’re greatly affected by
development, and droughts also deal temporary blows. “In the long term, most of the species will come back—assuming we haven’t destroyed the habitat in some other way,” DeLong-Amaya says.
Protecting flowers’ habitat is crucial in Cuero. Johnson grass takes advantage of “environmental disturbances”—like the shale boom’s increased truck traffic and construction—to invade and become established on roadsides, according to the Texas Department of Transportation’s 2022 Herbicide Manual. Once the grass is established, it can choke out native species like wildflowers. “I’ve seen small county roads that used to have a lot of wildflowers on them, and then they do a lot of shoulder work,” DeLong-Amaya says. “A year later, you have a monoculture of Johnson grass, and the quality of the landscape has plummeted tremendously.”
Despite its effect on infrastructure, some see the shale boom as a net positive for the county. “There are old farmers out there who never did anything but scratch the ground, and all of a sudden, they were getting a check in the mail for $250,000,” former County Commissioner Curtis Afflerbach says.
Klein doesn’t blame fracking for the loss of the flowers. He leased pads on his property to ConocoPhillips and used the money to help the Nature Conservancy establish the Frank Klein Cibolo Bluffs Nature Preserve near the Bracken Bat Cave. He has a different culprit in mind: excessive mowing during the flowers’ reseeding period.
In 2010, after complaints of high Johnson grass, the county mowed and sprayed the roadsides with herbicide. Afflerbach says the Wildflower Association tried to convince him to skip the herbicide to protect the flowers, but he felt he had no choice. “That Johnson grass was so tall, it would slap the mirrors on your pickup going down the road,” he says.
Due to the dissolution of the Wildflower Association, locals fear the flowers have lost their advocate. But grassroots efforts are starting to pay off.
Emily Davis—a former wildflower tour guide—works with Keep Cuero Beautiful to make seed balls from clay and seeds. The group then distributes them at farmers markets and to schoolchildren, encouraging people to scatter seeds throughout the county. Davis says they’re “big on milkweed,” a food source for the monarch butterfly, whose population has diminished along with its habitat. They hope to raise awareness of the importance of wildflowers to the county and ecosystem, and to inspire residents to preserve and nurture them.
“Someone who walks out into a field and picks one up can just as easily toss it aside without seeing what a wonder they are,” says Sister Elizabeth Riebschlager, an environmental advocate who grew up in Cuero. “Each one is a little miracle, with the design, with the color, with the patterns. And we took those for granted.”
