One of my favorite native wildflowers is an annual called coreopsis basalis, which is in the aster family. If you drive on Sullivan’s Island in May, I am sure you’ve seen this one all along the right of way on Jasper Boulevard and at the corner of Jasper at Station 22½ at David DeAntonio’s house, where you turn to get on the Ben Sawyer Causeway. Peggy Pringle Schachte and Hal Currey have planted its seeds at the traffic triangle at Middle and Station 18 streets. Bless the Sullivan’s Island Public Works Department for not mowing them until they finish blooming and leaving seeds for the next spring. My first coreopsis basalis came from seeds Clay Cable, former Isle of Palms mayor, let me collect from his yard on Palm Boulevard about 25 years ago, and they have replanted themselves from seed every year since then.
Their happy golden faces with maroon centers never fail to make me smile and think of spring. They are also called tickseed because their little brown seeds look like ticks. Their name comes from the Greek word “koris,” referring to bedbugs, another reference to how the seeds look. Native Americans used them to make yellow and orange dye, so they are commonly called dye flower as well. One theory is that coreopsis was brought to Florida from Central America by Native Americans in the 1500s, but there is not much mention of it by early botanists who were studying plants in the 1800s. It was declared the official wildflower of Florida in 1991.
Coreopsis does best in full sun in open spaces and sandy soil and is drought tolerant. Seeds should be sown on the surface of the soil in the fall, where they will do well through the winter and produce blooms. It was amazing that those tiny seedings survived through last winter’s cold spell, when the temperature was in the low 20s. Since coreopsis basalis is an annual, the plants will die by late June and need to be pulled up, leaving lots of seeds to sprout and bloom the next spring. I also have a perennial coreopsis that is all yellow without the maroon center, which I believe is coreopsis lanceolata. I ordered those seeds from Texas many years ago. I don’t pull those up when the flowers die since the plants last from year to year. These beautiful wildflowers are beneficial for pollinators such as bees and butterflies, and the seeds are a food source for birds.