Flower chasers perplexus

May 15, 2024

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

Rustic Road 51 in Wisconsin, just on the other side of the river near Maiden Rock, has long been one of our favorite springtime spots to visit.  The road winds through forested hills where a trout stream also wanders.  Birdsong falls through the green light of tall trees on steep hillsides. Fat bumblebees buzz along the ground, perhaps looking for places to nest.  

One side of the road is posted no trespassing, but as we walk along the edge of the road we look up at a wealth of early woodland wildflowers–large-flowered bellwort, false rue anemone, Jack-in-the-pulpit, wild blue phlox, Canadian wild ginger, Two-leaf miterwort, spreading Jacob’s ladder, red columbine, starry false Solomon’s seal, mayapple’s shiny leaves, Virginia spring beauty going to seed.  

And trilliums, trilliums, trilliums. We’ve come in search of three of Minnesota’s four trilliums. We’ve seen each of them before, but we’re hoping for a trillium hat trick of finding them all blooming at the same time. Large-flowered trillium (trillium grandiflorum), the easiest for us to identify, blooms in the thousands up the hillsides, its three white petals held brightly above three wide green leaves.  We spot drooping trillium (trillium flexipes) with its flower stem angling sharply up away from the leaves, then drooping in a graceful arc. It’s nodding (trillium cernuum) that’s perplexed us at times.  Nodding trillium’s  flower hangs down beneath the leaves, but sometimes drooping trillium’s flower also ends up hanging below the leaves, fooling us into thinking it might be nodding.  

Nodding? Drooping? We walk along the road, scrutinizing every trillium within sight, but even when we think we might just maybe have found a nodding trillium, our phones apps tell us “drooping.” Finally, near the end of the road we aim our phones at a single flower, and the identification flips back and forth between drooping and nodding.  Like us, the app seems uncertain. We decide to go with the nodding identification in the hope that we really have seen all three trilliums along the road.

But have we?  We are still flower chasers perplexus  as we head back home where an email awaits from a botanist and plant ecologist who explains that the flower stalks and anthers (the part of the flower that produces pollen) are usually longer on drooping trillium than on nodding  trillium.  

Next time we’ll bring along a ruler to see if we can be certain of the difference by measuring stalks and anthers. And since drooping trillium only grows in the southeast part of the state, we can also look farther north where a trillium flower hanging below the leaves has to be nodding trillium. 

Whether or not we have actually seen nodding trillium, though, we have spent a sweet evening in a stretch of woodland rich with wildflowers, shaded by tall trees and steep hillsides.  We have traveled back in time to when the countryside was rich in native wildflowers. 

And one day we will know nodding trillium for sure when we see it.  We just  need to keep learning and looking–two things we love to do.

More of what we are seeing now!