RIVER CITY JOURNAL: PLEASE PICK THE DAISIES; IT'S LEGAL AFTER ALL

This is my public apology to my wife, who has been accused of knicking roadside blossoms -- falsely.

My wife remarked, during a recent drive on I-55, that she was glad the highway department couldn't afford to mow along the highways anymore. This is because my wife is a big fan of wildflowers, particularly those that flourish along the verges and medians of our byways.

How many times have I slammed on the brakes after she has cried out (which is only a notch below a scream): "Did you see that?"

"That," it turns out, is a patch of coneflowers in dazzling array where bulldozers and dynamite have made way for asphalt and yellow stripes.

Moreover, I have accused my wife on many occasions of being a common thief, a criminal flower stealer who thinks the highway department and God are in cahoots to provide flora to the citizenry at a reasonable miles-per-gallon rate.

As a result of my protests, my wife often drives her own getaway car on such flower-gathering ventures. Or she enlists friends to keep the motor -- and the air conditioning -- running while she wades into a thicket here or a bramble there to snip some choice buds across a ditch next to where there most certainly must be an entire den of vipers.

I, of course, have visions during these escapades that the highway patrol's special flower-thief SWAT team is poised over yon hill waiting to swoop down on this master snatcher of daisies and black-eyed Susans.

As it turns out, I owe my wife my deepest and most sincere apologies for having held her up as little more than a common felon in the eyes of our sons and in the minds of countless family members, friends and complete strangers. It turns out (this confession business is tougher than I thought) that picking flowers along Missouri's highways is entirely legal.

You can imagine my chagrin when the Department of Natural Resources presented this fact to me in the form of a press release intended to thwart the digging of roadside wildflowers. A number of years ago such root-gathering was criminalized, because commercial operators were harvesting coneflower roots as an aphrodisiac, and the DNR could see the day when there were no wildflowers left to enjoy -- just a bunch of sex-crazy coneflower-root addicts.

This meant that casual wildflower gatherers, who know weeds that grow in concrete cracks and produce luscious blooms would also make good guests in a flower garden, were stepping over the legal limit by digging up a sweet William or a butterfly milkweed along Highway 34 to be transplanted next to the petunias at home.

So I naturally assumed picking wildflowers was equally illicit, just like in state and national parks where there are signs that promise concentration-camp stays or worse for removing even a bright-red maple leaf that has fallen to the ground. By the way, picking wildflowers on highway rights of way is permitted only for occasional bouquets. Commercial types who collect flowers to be dried and sold are, indeed, forbidden.

Now that she knows picking highway flowers isn't illegal, I'm afraid my wife will lose interest. She keeps eying bright blooms in yards around town, particularly yards where the houses look vacant.

That's called trespassing, Dear.

It's still illegal.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.