Did Every Texan Have This Same Fear Growing Up?
As someone who wasn't born or raised in Texas, there have been a lot of things for me to learn since I moved here. Thankfully, I have plenty of friends who grew up in the Lone Star State and have been able to educate me about the ways of the Texans.
I've also been exposed to plenty of Texans on the internet that talk about their experiences growing up here. One of the things I've been seeing a lot of on my TikTok feed a lot are people talking about their fear of picking bluebonnets as a kid. Apparently, many kids grew up thinking they would be arrested or in some type of serious trouble if they harmed the state flower.
Seeing people talk about it online, I decided to ask my friends who were raised here to see if they had this same experience.
One friend said he grew up doing Easter Egg hunts in a bluebonnet field and while he wasn’t afraid of being arrested as a kid, he was afraid of something else. He said, "you would get in trouble in the sense of they would beat me if I picked them." Apparently, there was a rather frightening woman that owned the field who would be very upset if the kids picked her flowers.
Another one of my Texan friends said that she knew it wasn’t illegal, but she knew not to trample a bunch of them for one of those aesthetic bluebonnet photos. It's true that it's not illegal to pick bluebonnets in Texas, although it is frowned upon. I can only assume many Texans told them it was illegal as a scare tactic to try and stop them from picking the beloved flower. I'm assuming my friend's families simply didn't use that as a scare tactic, which makes sense considering the second friend I spoke to has a police officer as a father. So it wouldn’t make much sense for an officer to be lying about the law to their kid.
Just know if you grew up in Texas thinking something bad would happen to you if you picked bluebonnets, you’re not alone. You're also not alone if that was never a concern of yours to begin with.