Check out our new book! An intrepid search for Minnesota’s wildflower treasures in out-of-the-way places. Featuring Povo’s gorgeous photographs and Root’s finely detailed descriptions of nearly two hundred species, Chasing Wildflowers is both a handy guidebook and an entertaining chronicle of the thrills and occasional mishaps of the friends’ searches, from wading rivers and climbing rocky outcrops to getting their boots stuck in deep muck while on the run from an approaching storm. Neither botanists nor biologists, Root and Povo are wildflower enthusiasts determined to learn about native wildflowers wherever they can be found, providing readers with all the information they might need to find and identify rare and intriguing species in unexpected places.
We’ve been on a search for all seven of Minnesota’s pyrola and so far have seen five of them (possibly six). The seventh, small shinleaf (Pyrola minor) is a species of special concern in Minnesota, which along with its small size and limited range makes it hard to track down.
Luckily we have a friend who delights in finding wildflowers, rare and otherwise, and who is generous in sharing their locations. When we told him we were still on the hunt for small shinleaf, he offered to show us a patch he had found. So we drove up to meet him in Grand Marais, where the breeze off the lake was a welcome coolness (this was pre-wildfire smoke). He warned us, though, that inland was hotter and muggier, and inland is where we were headed.
On our way to see the small shinleaf we stopped at Pincushion Mountain lookout, where our friend had seen pinesap. We’d seen pinesap once before about a mile along the trail to Bear and Bean Lake. Did we write down the coordinates to help us find it again? We did not. Besides, in our memories it was far gone to seed. So a quick walk along a short trail to see pinesap in better condition sounded just right.
But pinesap keeps its own schedule. Because it lacks chlorophyll and doesn’t need sunlight to produce food, it also doesn’t need to show itself above ground every year. Apparently this was one of those years.
Our friend offered to send us coordinates for another location not too far off our route home, and we headed on for the main event, finding small shinleaf.
If our first stop was a short walk down a trail, our hike to see small shinleaf was the opposite—a long bushwhack over uneven terrain through forest with alder thickets, waist-high patches of bracken fern, downed trees, and logs hidden underfoot. Did we mention the uneven hillside? Before long we were drenched in sweat, but we trusted our friend and slogged on after him, resisting the urge to ask, “Are we there yet?” (I could hear Kelly, though, behind me thinking it. Loudly.)
Finally he told us, “This looks like the place.”
And sure enough scattered on the forest floor were single upright stems with small white flowers, mostly done blooming but with a few flowers still open. Two other white-flowered shinleaf look similar, but not only are small shinleaf’s flowers arranged differently around the stem but it also has shorter styles (the slender stalk in the middle of the flower) while the flowers of the other two shinleaf are larger and have longer, curved styles like elephant trunks.
Kelly took photos, careful not to let sweat drip on her camera. I wrote down GPS coordinates, and Kelly asked me “Why?” There is a remote chance we would ever want to find this location again, (but not in hot and muggy weather without carrying a week’s worth of food and water and possibly a small battery operated fan). Then we headed back for the road by a shorter route with less bushwhacking and only one little creek to leap. We emerged from the woods soaked with perspiration, glad to see our cars not far down the road.
After many gulps of water and many thanks to our friend, we drove off in air conditioned comfort to check on a ditch we’d seen two years earlier full of lesser purple fringed orchid. Last year when we’d checked on the ditch, we found not a single sign of a single orchid. Were they gone? Taking a year off underground? Just not up yet? This year, because we were looking about a week later into summer, our hopes were high.
So were the orchids, about thirty of them growing out of the ditch, some in bud, some partly blooming. With happy hearts we drove on to spend the night with generous friends at their home on Lake Superior.
Now that we’d seen small shinleaf, we only needed to see round-leaved pyrola to complete the set. We thought we might have seen it last year along Woods Creek trail, although it might have been green-flowered pyrola, which looks similar but has duller leaves than round-leaved pyrola. On Sunday we set out to re-hike Woods Creek trail to check on which pyrola we had seen.
The day was hot and sunny. The creek babbled along below us, and we were grateful for occasional breezes that cooled us off. We saw plenty of pyrola—one-sided, pink, one-flowered— but when we came to the plants we’d been uncertain about, we knew enough now to identify them as dull-leaved green pyrola. So we are still on the hunt for pyrola number seven.
On the way home we detoured from the highway to follow our friend’s coordinates down narrower and narrower winding dirt roads until we came to the place he had sent us. And there, just where our friend had said, we found pinesap— a few stalks going to seed and one plant fighting its way up out of matted leaves, its stalks and flowers still ghostly white.
Epilogue: When we got home Kelly checked the picture she had taken of pinesap on the Bear and Bean Lake trail and realized that that pinesap had been in better and more colorful condition than the pinesap we’d seen along the road. And even though we had seen pinesap before, in a weekend that began and ended with a search for pinesap, with plenty of pyrola in between, it’s good to know that, under trees and down roads in the back of beyond, more pinesap makes at least an occasional appearance. To know, too, that somewhere in forests we may never hike again we have seen small shinleaf, thanks to our wildflower-wise friend.
Small shinleafSmall shinleaf flowerPink pyrolaShinleafOne-sided pyrolaOne-flowered pyrolaGreen-flowered pyrolaLesser purple fringed orchidPinesapPinesap just starting
It’s been twenty years this summer since we first set foot on the boardwalk into the Big Bog up by Waskish, Minnesota. I was working on a picture book that became One North Star, a counting book about some of Minnesota’s many habitats, and as I started doing research I learned that Minnesota has bogs. In fact, Minnesota’s peatlands are vast, the most of any state except Alaska. And I knew that to write about the bog I would need to go to the bog.
Kelly and I love taking road trips, so when I told her I was headed up to the Big Bog, she said, “I’ll come, too.” And we went.
The walk out on the mile-long Big Bog boardwalk took us into a landscape I had never experienced before. By the time we reached the end of the boardwalk I was in love with the bog and wanted to write a whole book about it. And Kelly had begun to take wildflower pictures, something new in her photography career. Eventually our mutual love of native wildflowers took us criss-crossing the state and creating a wildflower-chasing blog and two wildflower books.
So what could be better, twenty years later, than to head up to where it all started? When we arrived at Big Bog State Recreation Area at the camper cabin we had rented, we were worn out from the heat of the day and some serious wildflower chasing stops on our drive north. We agreed that we could better appreciate the bog and the boardwalk after a good night’s sleep and some excellent Mexican carry-out we had picked up in Bemidji.
We have always been crack-of-dawn risers, and the next morning we left early (but not before coffee, never before coffee) and drove the few miles north to the Big Bog Boardwalk. Would the magic still be there?
Yes.
As we made our way along the boardwalk, we compared what we remembered with what we were seeing. In our first wildflower book I wrote that it was one of the wildest places I had ever seen. It still is.
The tamarack and black spruce trees were still stunted, although they seemed to reach farther out into the bog along the boardwalk than we remembered. On our first trip, almost all the plants and flowers were new to us. This time we could name them — bog cranberry, wild calla lily, round-leaved sundew, leatherleaf, cottongrass — and we were able to figure out the difference between bog laurel gone to seed and bog rosemary gone to seed, something we had no clue about twenty years earlier. Near the end of the boardwalk purple pitcher plants poked their pinwheel flowers up above the many-colored mosses stretching out under an endless sky.
The biggest difference we noticed was that the bog seemed dryer than we remembered. Was this because of climate change? A dry year? Or simply that memories are chancy?
We have learned, in our wanderings, how places change. Habitats aren’t static. Flowers don’t always stay put, sometimes spreading, sometimes vanishing. Trees encroach when they can.
We have changed, too, although it’s hard to believe that we’ve changed twenty years’ worth. Surely we’re not really twenty years older? But we are, and we’re always grateful we can still be chasing flowers, in bogs or woodlands or prairies or along roadsides–wherever we find them. It’s good to come back after twenty years to a place that feels like the beginnings of our flower-chasing and find that the bog remains mysterious and vast and wild. It fills us with the same stillness, the same magic, the same otherness that we remembered.
I wonder what we’ll find when we come back twenty years from now.
We can’t wait to find out.
Leatherleaf in seedBog laurel in seedCottongrassRound-leaved sundewWild callaPurple pitcher plantPurple pitcher plant bloomTamarackBig Bog Recreation Area Boardwalk
It’s been a while since Kelly’s and my schedules aligned, but this past weekend they did, so we headed to some of our favorite places looking for orchids. And whatever else we could see, of course–it’s not that we’re just orchid fanatics. Really we’re not.
Our first orchid stop (okay, we’re a little fanatical) was an unmarked turnoff that a friend had found and shared with us. We’d been here before, the last time memorably getting our boots stuck in muck as we ran from a rainstorm. This time, although rain threatened, none fell.
This tucked-away cedar grove is one of the few places we’ve seen large round-leaved orchid (Platanthera orbiculata) with its almost ethereal looking blossoms. Under the shade of cedar trees the orchids were beginning to bloom, and among them we also found blunt-leaved orchid (Platanthera obtusata) blooming, one of the very few places we’ve ever seen it.
Diligent searching for lesser rattlesnake plantain orchid, which we’d seen there before, resulted in one tiny plant growing out of a mossy log. I called for Kelly to come see, but we had both wandered in different directions, and by the time we reconnected I had lost my bearings and couldn’t relocate the very tiny lesser rattlesnake plantain. But it was growing there, and so, along the trail into the site, were several lovely Loesel’s twayblade orchids.
By the time we reached Iron Springs Bog Scientific and Natural Area (SNA) the day had turned hot and muggy, but we didn’t care. We were in one of our very favorite flower-chasing places, and it didn’t disappoint. We saw showy lady’s- slipper orchids–far too many to count. We also saw a long-bracted frog orchid, and plenty of Platanthera huronensis and Platanthera aquilonis blooming. These two similar orchids of the Platanthera genus are the reason we felt compelled to learn the scientific names of all eleven of the Platanthera orchids that grow in Minnesota. Not only did they look similar but the various common names for them also confusingly overlap. Both have been commonly called some combination of tall northern bog orchid, northern green orchid, northern bog orchid, north wind bog orchid, northern green bog orchid. Just to be sure we knew which orchid we meant we took to calling them huronensis and aquilonis. The habit spilled over into the other Platanthera genus members. Besides, although we are not botanists, we feel rather botany-ish using scientific names.
Our hunt for white adder’s-mouth was unsuccessful, as was our hunt for tall white bog orchid (Platanthera dilatata), but we did see plenty of green adder’s- mouth (familiarly known to us as mop top–we’re not always botany-ish). Our trip included two more orchid-seeking stops the next day. By the time we arrived at the first unmarked site, the air had turned thundery, so we donned our rain coats and made our way to where we had once seen Hooker’s orchid (Platanthera hookeri). So many trees had fallen since our last visit that we were sure they were covering up the orchids we’d seen there before and couldn’t find now.
Rain fell in torrents as we headed back to the car. Luckily we had our raincoats on, although we hadn’t bothered with rain pants. We’ll dry soon, we assured ourselves. But it’s hard for wet pants to dry when the rain keeps falling. Sitting on towels, we drove down the road to another favorite SNA, where to our delight we found a whole little patch of blunt-leaved orchid (Platanthera obtusata) just beginning to bloom in the silvery light. Luckily I use an all-weather notebook, and Kelly always brings an umbrella for me to hold over her camera in inclement weather. In the same small area we also found early coralroot, heart-leaved twayblade gone to seed, lesser round-leaved orchid gone to seed, showy lady’s-slipper, bloomed-out small yellow lady’s-slipper, and a colony of tiny rattlesnake plantain growing jubilantly over a mossy hummock. Orchid heaven for flower chasers.
By the time we were ready to head home our orchid-seeking hearts and our pants were both saturated. In our haste to put on dry clothes when no cars were driving by, I somehow left a boot behind, and Kelly’s sunshade had disappeared, although we didn’t realize either loss until we got home and unloaded my gear when Kelly dropped me at my house. If anyone comes across a single hiking book with a tick gaiter attached to it or a round nylon case containing an expandable sun shade, you know where to find us.
A boot, a gaiter, and a sunshade seem like small losses weighed against the wealth of wildflowers and orchids that we saw. Even if we’d seen nothing, it felt good to be searching again. And yes, we saw plenty of other flowers besides orchids–twinflower, bunchberry, purple pitcher plant, Canada mayflower, one-flowered pyrola, one-sided pyrola, round-leaved pyrola, pink pyrola, green-flowered pyrola, shinleaf, tufted loosestrife, and more. Even if we hadn’t seen orchids, our hearts would still be overflowing.
It’s good to be out and about, chasing flowers (and sometimes even catching them) again.
