“Wildflowers” was written by Dolly Parton specifically for the Trio project — the collaboration with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris that had been in progress since the late 1970s and was finally recorded and released as Trio (Warner Bros., March 2, 1987). Parton wrote the song to evoke the Appalachian folk tradition the album was reaching toward: acoustic guitar, autoharp, and fiddle, with an arrangement designed to sound as if it had always existed rather than having been composed for this occasion. The track appears as the album’s tenth and final song.
The lyric uses wildflowers as a metaphor for independence and freedom — a wildflower feels out of place among cultivated garden flowers and grows best when left unconstrained. Parton described the song as being about restlessness and the desire to branch out, though the sentiment mapped naturally onto the three voices performing it: three women who had each built their careers in different corners of the same tradition, none of them entirely comfortable with the commercial expectations placed on them.
Released as the fourth single from Trio in 1988, “Wildflowers” reached #6 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart. The album won the Grammy for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal in 1988 and remains a landmark of the acoustic-country crossover that ran parallel to the bluegrass revival in the 1980s. Parton’s song outlasted the album’s commercial moment; it is now among the Trio recordings most closely identified with the acoustic and folk aesthetics the project represented.