Just 26, 2025
Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo
Read this post on our blog at flowerchasers.com
Sunrise streaks the sky pink, yellow, and grayish blue as we make a quick before-class trip back to Horseshoe Harbor. Rocks, water, wildflowers–this is quintessential Lake Superior, and we love it.
In class we study river’s-edge plants, then drive to Bete Grise Preserve and hike through the woods to eat lunch under towering white pines along the beach. This is a new habitat for us, a complex of upland sand dunes alternating with wetlands swales. Delicate bell-shaped flowers hang from lowbush blueberry and velvet-leaf blueberry along the dune edge, and flowers that we’ve only ever seen before growing in woods–bunchberry, starflower, Canada mayflower–surprise us by also growing here in deep sand. In the wetland swales behind the dunes we find leatherleaf, Labrador tea, blue flag iris, and many sedges.
The last stop of the day is a fen, a habitat that makes our hearts happy. Here we find small cranberry, bog rosemary, purple pitcher plant, rose pogonia (one in bloom, most still in bud), and clusters and clusters of sundew, both round-leaved and spoon-leaf, glistening in the sunlight.
Even though the class is over, Kelly and I haven’t quite had our fill of flower chasing. We stop briefly by a roadside to catch American cancer-root in flower, then head to Cy Clark Memorial Nature Sanctuary where we find tesselated rattlesnake plantain and giant rattlesnake plantain nestled in moss. We’ve made it our goal to see giant rattlesnake plantain in a different location each day we’re here, and we’ve succeeded. Giant rattlesnake plantain doesn’t grow in Minnesota, so we won’t see it again until we return to the Keweenaw Peninsula.
Which we definitely will.
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