Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo
I keep wanting to write a book called Next Year’s Garden because every garden I plant makes me think, “Next year I’ll do it this way.” Just as every year offers new opportunities to plant other flowers and vegetables or to try different varieties, so each year of wildflower searching offers new opportunities to see both old favorites and also flowers we haven’t yet encountered.
We know we’ll begin the year in late March or early April with skunk cabbage making its own heat, with snow trilliums blooming through a snowfall, with pasque flowers opening on a high hillside. We hope to see favorite woodland flowers, prairie flowers, bog flowers. But we’re eager, too, to see flowers and plants we haven’t seen before. So here is our wish list for 2019 of flowers so far unseen or as yet unphotographed:
Ball cactus blooming
Brittle cactus blooming
Squirrel corn
Autumn coral root
Striped coral root
Tubercled rein orchid
Glade mallow
Hill’s thistle
Places we want to visit:
Rustic roads in Wisconsin
Clinton Falls Trout Lily Scientific and Natural Area
Ladies Tresses Swamp Scientific and Natural Area
Lawrence Creek Scientific and Natural Area
Iron Springs Scientific and Natural Area
Black Lake Bog Scientific and Natural Area
No matter how eager we are to start looking, it’s clearly winter outside, and winter has its own beauty, which we’ll enjoy while we wait for the earliest bloomers to show up.
Here’s to a bountiful year of native flowers for us all.
Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo
