In Victorian times native wildflowers used to be fashionable accessories and many people used to go to the country to harvest large numbers of these flowers. Wildflowers persist in the numbers that they do today only because of the activism and research by a group of women ecologists in the early 1900’s. Read more about this in the The Women Who Saved Wildflowers, An untold story of the female ecologists who pioneered wildflower conservation in the Sierra Magazine.