Early Sunday morning, I like to walk Middle Road from West Tisbury just across the line into Chilmark. On weekdays, the traffic is too heavy and too fast for strollers. There was a time when the Middle Road was an ideal spot for picking low and high bush blueberries. They grew in profusion on the right hand side, going toward Chilmark, but last year and this year there have been none and I am wondering why. Happily, however, I am still finding wildflowers here and there. I know they are only ordinary wildflowers but I enjoy seeing them and picking them as I have for mini-bouquets most of my life.

This past Sunday, I found blue chicory and the clustered grayish flowers of yarrow, which I have not seen in a long time. There were the yellow, button-like flowers of tansy, too. And there was Queen Anne’s lace, always a perfect addition to any bouquet.

I learned from my neighbor, Anne Burt, when I came home and showed off my mini-bouquet that I was fortunate to have seen the chicory in bloom, for only before noon are its flowers their pretty, delicate blue. A book of wildflower lore tells me that, in German, its name means “watcher by the road.” It was so called for a young woman whose sailor fiancé was lost at sea. She waited for him by a roadside until she died there of a broken heart. God honored her for her devotion by creating a roadside flower that was blue like her lover’s sailor suit.

As for the grayish yarrow, my book tells me, its leaves may be ground up, boiled and turned into a salve that will staunch the flow of blood. It was so used on the wounds of soldiers in the Trojan War. The leaves of tansy, I have learned, have been used medicinally since the Middle Ages to treat, among other things, sunburn. Chicory root, I vaguely remember, was ground up and used as a very bitter substitute for coffee when coffee was scarce in World War II.

It is too late, of course, for daisies, my favorite among summer wildflowers but goldenrod, a fall favorite, is beginning to bloom. Fall is when I should make sure, too, to go to the edge of Tisbury Great Pond or the Lagoon in search of deep brown cattails for my year-round bouquets.

I have always liked exploring Island woods in search of wildflowers. I remember when there were white Indian pipes on the East Chop downs. Juice from them I was told was believed by Native Americans to improve eyesight. On the downs, in my childhood, I could also find hooded jack-in-the-pulpit plants and orange tiger lilies. Both lined the path that took me up hill and down to the Oak Bluffs harbor.

And, of course, wild blueberries and huckleberries were plentiful there then. Houses now have replaced that path and the berries and the wildflowers there are gone. That makes me especially grateful for whatever I find for my bouquets these summer Sundays along West Tisbury’s Middle Road.