John Bourroughs Named This One

How native plants are assigned names is frequently a mystery.  For this flower the naming process is well documented.  John Bourroughs wrote about this plant at great length.  In his day the name Dog Tooth Violet was the label frequently associated with this treasure.  Mr. Burroughs objected to that name on two points.  First, the flower has the structure of a lily not a violet.  Secondly, he could find nothing about the plant that suggested canine teeth.  The mottled leaf markings reminded him of the native fish trout and the timing of the plants appearance each spring coincided with his pursuit of that fish.  In his writings, he suggested that the plant be called Trout Lily and that became the plant's enduring popular name.

The single leaves pictured here portray one of the great mysteries about this plant.  These leaves are rather large suggesting a mature plant but single leaved plants never flower.  Only plants with two leaves produce flowers.  Burroughs spent not an inconsiderable amount of time trying to solve the puzzle.  He concluded that only older deeply rooted plants produced two leaves and flowers but he could find no plausible explanation for the method of a seed dropped on the forest floor's surface developing a corm that pulled itself ever deeper each year into the soil.  Here we have single leaved plants by the thousands but precious few that flower.  Our bedrock ridge is solidly stone.  Glacial action left what we call soil heavily littered with broken stone of all sizes.  We believe that the overwhelming presence of stone here prevents the Trout Lily from working its corm deeply into the ground.  New plants spring from the wandering roots but plants that flower are rare here.

In this spot the soil depth exceeds six inches.  The corm is deep sending up two leaves and a flower,  This early flower holds an enduring allure on us.  Our rare arbutus flowers earlier while the trout lily is common but mostly without flowers.  These yellow blossoms made their first appearance in our shade garden today.  We moved the plants from our woods into our garden several years ago.  They multiplied like weeds but no flowers were seen until today.  We also found several flowering plants in our woods.  That too is unusual.  We commonly find headless flower stems.  My guess is that the turkeys eat the flowers and the insects that alight there.  It is likely that we happened on these blossoms on the first day that they were open.

The view from the rear clearly shows the flowers structure and its insect companion.

The view from the front is heavily pollen laden.  I owe a huge debt of gratitude to John Bourroughs and his written words.  They awakened in me a desire and an interest to explore and enjoy the small parts of the natural world that surrounds us all.

Trout Lily Buds And Flowers

Several years preceding my retirement were filled with dreams focused on how to pleasantly use endless days filled with free time.  John Burroughs' writings described his time spent tramping about outside close to nature.  That brought back pleasant  memories of much of my childhood time spent doing exactly the same thing.  A picture of a retirement lifestyle defined by living on remote private land gradually came into clear focus.  In 1994 dreams became reality with the purchase of the last piece of a former farm.

Trout lily was first encountered by me in a Burroughs' essay entitled Among The Wild Flowers.  It was there that he suggested several names more appropriate for this plant than the then used Adder's Tongue or Dog Tooth Violet.  Lily had to be in the name since the structure of the flower is not a violet but is a lily.  Trout accurately reflected a fish very popular to Burroughs and the timing of that fish rising to the surface of the water to feed on the first hatch of insects at the same time of year that these flowers appeared.  His suggested name became widespread and remains in common use today.  Erythronium americanum was well known to me because of frequent rereadings of this essay before I ever found the plant growing in the wild.

I was as giddy as a child on Christmas morning when a trout lily in flower was first found in our newly purchased woods.  A single yellow blossom floated above twin fresh green leaves that were mottled with brown patches.  All of this striking color had just pushed above the brown fallen leaves that carpeted the forest floor.  Further exploration revealed single leaved plants by the hundreds but only an occasional twin leaved plant in bloom.  The relative lack of flowers here made the rare find of a yellow lily flower seem precious to me.

Burroughs also wondered about just how a trout lily plant produced flowers.  Seeds fell to the forest floor and the life cycles that followed took the lily bulb ever deeper into the soil.  When the bulb was more than six inches under ground, two leaves and a flower were produced.  At more shallow placements only a single leaf grew.  Here the glacier left extremely stone filled soil and few bulbs are able to reach the deep placement necessary for flower production.  In our more than two decades spent living here we have seen many single leaved plants return year after year but the flowering plants remain rare.

A careful look at the above photo will find a flower bud still tightly wrapped by the second leaf.  Its job is to protect the bud as it is pushed thru several inches of soil and the web that is typical of the forest floor.  How such a delicate flower can open unmarked after such a journey remains a source of wonder.

This bud is almost ready to push free of the leaf.  Following years of preparation, this beautiful flower will last for only a short time.  It will be replaced by a seed capsule containing the beginnings of another generation of plants few of which will ever flower.