California Trout Lily

Here again we stretch the meaning of native plant.  There is a New York native Trout Lily with leaves very similar to these but yellow flowers.  These pictured here also carry the name Trout Lily but the flowers are wildly different.  There is nothing shy or coy about these California natives.  The petals are thrust way back clearly placing the reproductive parts in the foreground.  Making seeds to insure the next generation is the functional reason these flowers exist.

They reproduce so quickly that transplants were pulled from this ground just recently.  Those moved plants also have open flowers today.  Despite a poorly timed move, we still see five of five plants strongly growing in their new home.

Our early weeding has unearthed these bulbs frequently.  We were unsure of just what plant would grow from them.  It turns out that the locally native Trout Lily freely reproduces from seeds simply dropped on the surface of the ground by last season's flowers.  This bulb's work has barely begun since a flower producing bulb must be several inches below the surface.

Thickly self planted, these Trout lilies are crowded together like weeds.  Flowers will likely be sparse here this year since these young plants have yet to produce deep set bulbs.  Shallowly placed plants with but a single leaf do not flower.  Deeper set bulbs send up two leaves one of which is tightly wrapped around the bud.  We will look daily searching for yellow buds.

Plants continue to teach us.  Round lobed hepatica commonly presents violet colored blossoms.  This transplant has finally settled in and this year gave us a nice set of white colored blossoms.  Its nearby neighbor sent up the more common violet colored flowers.

Becky just returned from her lawn tractor ride down to the developing shade garden.  She reported seeing three Trilliums pushing above the ground.  One was reported to have a stem thicker than her index finger.  With rain in the forecast for the next several days, we should soon see above ground appearances by several more of our native treasures.  It is truly helpful to have something quietly alive promising great beauty for us to focus on.

Weeding Trilliums

Giant White Trillium is a flower from my youth.  Childhood memories dictated that they hold a prominent  place in our shade gardens.  Like many native wildflowers, considerable time is necessary for them to adjust to new surroundings.  This is an impressive old clump that is under attack from Trout Lilies.  This picture was taken after the area was cleared.  Chopped leaves now cover ground that was gently cleared of invaders.  More lilies will be weeded out.

When we first explored our newly purchased land twenty-five years ago, few flowering Trout Lilies were seen since stony ground limited their growth.  When moved to our shade garden that was built with deep stone free soil, they grew like weeds.  Their removal was necessary to protect the Trillium.

These removed weeds show just how serious their invasion will become.  Each white thick new root will grow a more deeply placed corm.  One single leaved nonflowering plant sports three such roots.  This single plant will become at least four by next year.  The only option was to make some clear ground between the two types of plants.

This piece of our new shade garden lies between our neighbors lawn and a stone lined path.  Placed in this ground that is not connected to the main part of the garden, ferns and Trout Lilies can compete for the open ground.  Each is expected to hold their own with this placement.  The lilies are approaching the end of their season with flowers just as the ferns are beginning to send up new growth.  Since both are stunning woodland plants, more of each will be transplanted here as new woodland soil is mixed.  Many other duties are calling for our attention now but for some reason this new garden has taken on an undeniable urgency.

Early May Wildflowers

The plant killing horrors of this year's March weather have been replaced with numerous native ephemeral treasures carrying out their spring life cycle.  This photo shows several stages of Blood-root flowers.  Upper left finds an older flower beginning to drop its petals.  Upper right shows a newly opened blossom.  Center left contains a mature bloom that has lost nearly all of its yellow pollen.  Center right has a perfect flower.  Lower left displays a young seed pod against the backdrop of a leaf.  Drought took Blood-root flowers from my garden while they flourish in Irma's woods. Our order of new plants will be here any day now.  The new woodland garden down by the road is waiting!

These early Arbutus flowers will soon be joined by many others that are still closed buds.  Transplanted on our land several years ago, these flowers are highly prized.  The major allure here is their scent.  The good news is that we can still stand up after dropping to the ground to draw in the memorable aroma.  The native stone was placed to support the protective wire cage that is the reason these plants still flourish.  Being evergreen carries some risks.  Rabbits devour unprotected Arbutus plants when the snow first begins to melt.  Insects ate the only partially destroyed leaves.

Irma's woods lie on a south facing sloped bedrock ridge.  The concentrated warmth of the sun there has these Trout Lilies at their height of bloom.  Our plants are just beginning to release their buds from the tightly wrapped leaves that safely carried them through several inches of forest soil.  Soon we will find similar flowers closer to home.

The steeply sloped roadside bank revealed flowers that we have never before seen.  Wild Ginger keeps its flowers hidden from sight close to the ground.  Looking uphill we finally got to see these flowers.  Flies are the pollinating agent so these flower's scent is much like rotting mouse meat.  We passed on a chance to sample that odor.  At home, our transplants have yet to open their tightly closed leaves.  The pictured leaves will soon be much larger hiding the flowers from prying eyes.

Here we see a single Spring Beauty flower behind a row of Hepatica flowers.  It is uncommon for the digital camera to capture the color of a Spring Beauty flower.  Usually all that is seen is white.  Most of the leaves in this picture are Ramps. Sharp-lobed  Hepatica flowers precede their leaves which can be seen here just beginning to unfurl to the right of the Spring Beauty flower.

These freshly opened Hepatica flowers show both their blue petals and white pollen.  Opening leaves surround the flower petals in three places.  Apparently, younger plants have fewer leaves with blue coloration.

Several of these multi-flowered stunning Sharp-lobed Hepatica plants occur singly across the roadside bank.  Their bright pure white color stands out in sharp contrast to the dull brown of decaying fallen tree leaves.  It is possible that older plants have many more flowers.  Some of these larger plants were growing up through the mud filled ditch at road's edge.  I really wanted to dig them up and give them a proper home.  Responsible reason prevailed and they remain where nature planted them.

This is the more common coloration of Spring Beauty flower pictures.  The camera misses nearly all of the delightful pink color. The plant in the upper left corner of the picture shows off  the plant's small  green  leaves.

This is the promise of more to come.  This white Trillium was fall planted in our new woodland garden.  Flower buds can be seen on this newly emerged plant.  It looks like two flowers will appear here during this plants first year with us.  We will need to return to Irma's woods as the Trillium there have yet to open their flowers.  Recent logging will have severely reduced the vast number of plants there but the opening of the forest canopy will aid in their return.

We found our spirits lifted by these early flowers.  Decline that accompanies age is making working in the dirt more difficult for us.  That reality may have heightened our pleasure in finding these flowering plants existing totally on their own.  Many more will follow as the month unfolds and we will try to see them all.  Their allotted time each year is short but they make the most of each day.  We will try to do the same.

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.