Queen of the bluebonnets

BROWNSVILLE – Irene Harding, 87, has had her share of luck to deal with. Some good, some bad.

In 1961, Mrs. Harding and her husband, Jack Harding, moved from Chicago to Brownsville with three small children and a cat.

Mrs. Harding said she cried for the first year. Their children were all in school and she did not have local friends, at least not yet.

As luck would have it, Brownsville was not Chicago. The Hardings had left behind family and friends to come to the Texas border, and it was not nearly as cosmopolitan as Chicago and way hotter. Irene Harding considered her luck on this occasion was no royal flush.

In 1966, the Hardings returned to Chicago and were dealt yet another bad hand. The Chicago region was hit with an unprecedented winter, even for Chicago, with severe snowfalls reaching 26 inches.

According to Mrs. Harding, thoughts of Brownsville began to sound like a much better deal.

So, the family took another gamble, packed up once again and left their beloved Chicago to head back to Brownsville. It was August 1967.

One month later, Hurricane Beulah – the only major hurricane of the 1967 Atlantic Hurricane season – struck the Texas coast and pounded the Rio Grande Valley with rain and wind. At one point, Beulah was a Category 5 hurricane and dumped 27 inches of rain in a 36-hour period on Brownsville and the Harding family. It was ironic that the Harding family had to endure one inch of rain more than the snow in the Chicago snowstorm. Hurricane Beulah spawned 115 twisters, a record at the time, and President Lyndon B. Johnson declared the 24 counties of South Texas a disaster area.

No doubt, more than bad luck was involved in the Hardings’ weather woes. But in spite of their initial bad luck, Mrs. Harding still lives in the Lake Village area, in the same house she and her husband bought in 1961.

The property includes another lot that Mrs. Harding cultivated into a prosperous vegetable garden, with tomatoes, onions, carrots and asparagus. But as the years passed, Mrs. Harding decided to slow down some. In 2003, one of her sons sent her a one-pound package of Bluebonnet seeds.

Determined to be as successful with her wildflower garden as she was with the vegetable garden, she mixed the seeds with potting soil and broadcast them.

Her luck would hold. There was substantial rain, and Mrs. Harding’s Bluebonney field was a great success.

This Bluebonnet season, though, a little more bad luck. Mrs. Harding is battling Genista broom moths, which are eating the flowers. That means the plants will not go to seed and will result in a loss of seeds for next year. It’s easy to see the concern on her face as she closely examines tender stalks infested with the bright orange worms.

There’s a spray she could use to kill the pests, she said, but doesn’t dare because it’s way too windy and would kill the honeybees.

So, Mrs. Harding is making her own luck this time, battling the worms by hand. She’s picking them off the plants and just squishing them into the ground with her foot, she said with relish.

Mrs. Harding’s friends and family see her as a Queen of Hearts, but the rest of Brownsville knows her as the Queen of Bluebonnets. As she surveys the patch of blue that once was nothing more than hardscrabble, her smile rivals the twinkle in her bright, Bluebonnet blue eyes.