April 25, 2026
Author: Phyllis Root • Photographer: Kelly Povo
If we sound intoxicated by spring, it’s because we are, giddy with the glory of flowers bursting into blissful bud and bloom.
Down in the driftless area of southeastern Minnesota where deciduous forests climb steep hills, flowers bloom early before trees leaf out fully and shade the ground. The driftless is also decidedly hilly, and as we age we find ourselves more judicious about which steep slopes we scamper up. Luckily, flowers often obligingly bloom up and down the wooded hillside, where we can wander along on flatter ground looking up into whole hillsides of spring wildflowers.
One of our goals this year is to visit places new to us as well as familiar places and flowers. This past weekend we explored just such a place, a hiking path through part of Whitewater Wildlife Management Area with a wooded hill rising on one side. Trees greened with new leaves, but plenty of sunlight still reached the forest floor, creating a hilly flower-chasing heaven visible from the path. Within a few steps we were delighting in Virginia bluebells, wild blue phlox, hepatica, and Dutchman’s breeches plants with flowers so small we called them baby breeches. Canadian wild ginger hid its flowers under fuzzy leaves, fiddlehead ferns unfurled, wood anemone and nodding trillium budded. Bloodroot was mostly bloomed out, but scads of scalloped leaves stood upright around stems topped by pointy seed pods.
And then, around a bend in the road and up a ravine, we find a hillside covered with countless Virginia spring beauty’s pink-and-white-striped blossoms. In among the pink profusion a batch of white trout lily flowers nods gracefully. Around the next bend in the road, another hillside covered in Virginia spring beauty–more than we’ve ever seen except once before on the back of a goat prairie.
Whitewater State Park is another of our springtime favorites. We head there hopeful for twinleaf, which grows in Minnesota at the edge of its range. Twinleaf looks similar to bloodroot, but while bloodroot has a single leaf, twinleaf’s two leaves surround the flower, looking almost like one bowtie-shaped leaf. Finding twinleaf is always a thrill, since the flowers last only a few days and are so fragile that the weight of a single bumblebee can cause their petals to drop. Low down on the hillside–minimal climbing required– we discover several clusters of twinleaf freshly in bloom. Our knees and backs were grateful.
And then, nearby, a fortuitous find: eleven showy orchis, their vaselike clusters of leaves barely up out of the ground. Showy orchis is Minnesota’s earliest orchids, and we’ll return to this bunch of plants in a week or two for the lovely–and showy–flowers.
We also see many of the usual springtime suspects: Eastern false rue anemone; wood anemone; rue anemone; common violets in shades of blueish white, purple, and fuchsia; cutleaf toothwort; two-leaf miterwort (aka bishop’s cap); yellow trout lily; large-flowered bellwort. Beside the trout stream burbling alongside the trail multitudes of Mayapple grow, the ones with two umbrella-like leaves hiding buds beneath.
The Driftless Area’s hills are also a home for goat prairies–dry hillside prairies so steep that, so the story goes, only goats can climb them. Spring comes early to the prairie as well as the woods, so we drive to Mound Prairie Scientific and Natural Area (SNA) to see if anything is blooming there. The hillside is dotted with color – purple clusters of birdfoot violet, yellow whirligigs of wood betony, bright yellow-orange puccoon. What can we do but climb this hillside to see what else we might find?
And we do find more flowers–small stars of blue-eyed grass and yellow star-grass, plains wild indigo under pale yellow flowers, downy painted-cup, bastard toadflax. Halfway up the hill we figure we have seen what there is to see and don’t need to climb any higher.
Then a glance up the hill reveals bright spots of magenta spilling over a rocky outcrop almost at the hill’s top. What could they be but jeweled shooting stars, a flower we find more commonly in woods? And what can we do but clamber toward them, clinging to rocks that we check first to make sure no snakes are soaking up the sun on top of them? The climb is more than worth it, a spectacular show of jeweled shooting star. The day has become brightly sunny and windy, not the best conditions for photography, but I manage to throw shade on a few blossoms without throwing myself down the hill so Kelly can get a close-up picture. Then we gingerly make our way back to the foot of the goat prairie.
Whether standing at their bases or scrambling to the top, we get high on hillsides. And we are grateful that when we need to, we can still make it to the top of a hill.
See more of what we are seeing now!
