flowerchasers – Flower Chasers

Pinesap, Pyrola, Perspiration

July 11-12, 2026

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

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.

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A Tale of Two Boardwalks

May 30, 2026

Author: Phyllis Root • Photographer: Kelly Povo

Violet season is fleeting. We’ve seen all nineteen of Minnesota’s native violets now, and we are working on definitively telling them apart. Green violet, once we found it, was unmistakable, but the others–purple, blue, white–can be baffling. Are stems sparsely hairy, partly hairy, very hairy, hairless? Are the leaf surfaces hairy only on the tops, or on both tops and bottoms, or just around the edges, which might or might not be scalloped? Is the beard (tiny hairs on the centers of petals) short? Are the hairs club-shaped? Not there at all? Visible with an electron microscope? Okay, that last is an exaggeration. We never carry an electron microscope with us. But some details are so minute that only in a photo or with a hand lens do tiny differences reveal themselves.

A 1957 article on violets mentions “the tendency of species to hybridize with their close relatives, producing a bewildered variety of intermediate forms.” No wonder the violets have bewildered us–they are busily interbreeding.

On a day promising to be blistering in the twin cities we headed north to track down several similar-looking violets–three purple/blue and three white. First stop: Magney-Snively Natural Area near Duluth where along a trail we found blue violets which we determined with close inspection to have club-shaped beard hairs. Since marsh blue violet is the only violet to have club-shaped beard hairs, and since they grew in a wet area, we could definitively say, Yep, marsh blue. Nearby we also found Carolina spring beauty, a wider-leaved relative of Virginia spring beauty, along with trillions of trillium, both large-flowered and nodding.

At Hartley Nature Center we found another of the blue violets on our list: Great Lakes violet. It helps that this violet is only found in the Arrowhead region of the state, and it helps even more that close looking revealed that the lower petal was bearded, unlike the similar-looking arrow-leaved violet.

We had one last stop to make at Sax-Zim Bog, where we both were absolutely certain we had seen kidney-leaved violet the previous year at the welcome center, just steps away from the parking lot. Either we had parallel memory lapses or the violets were already bloomed out. What we did find was a boardwalk through a poor fen, which we knew was a poor fen because last summer we learned which four plants were poor fen indicators. And there they were, all in bloom: white leatherleaf bells, white labrador tea flowers, pale pink bog rosemary bells, and deep magenta bog laurel flowers.

Though it might be classified as a poor fen, this was a habitat rich in plants. A small hummock of moss held its own little microhabitat, with creeping snowberry in bud and round-leaved sundew glistening in the light. A garter snake slithered away, then paused, perhaps thinking itself hidden, although its black and yellow stripes stood out against the greens and red of mosses. Somewhere a white-throated sparrow sang.

Along the boardwalk we met two folks and learned that, among other restoration projects, they had converted a golf course in Wisconsin into Three Waters Reserve, a restored prairie/oak savanna where purple milkweed grows. Purple milkweed, long gone from Minnesota (if it was ever here), has been on our wish list for years. We are already planning a road trip to go see it.

It was hard to take those last steps off the boardwalk, but the day was drawing down toward a long summer evening, and we wanted to make one last quick stop. At the Warren Woessner bog boardwalk we hoped to see stemless lady’s-slipper in bud, and we did, with their graceful leaves and curving stems and flowers almost ready to open. The plants along this boardwalk were more boggish, including three-leaf false Solomon’s seal and goldthread, and instead of hurrying back to the car we moseyed to the end of the boardwalk.

And there, at the very end by the viewing platform, was one white violet. Close examination revealed no beard hairs, which, along with its sparsely hairy, roundish leaves, identified it as kidney-leaf violet.

We’d set out to find violets, and we did. But we also found boardwalks across fens and bogs and met two people who work to protect and restore wild places. As one of them said while we chatted about bees and teas and butterflies and, of course, flowers: “Places like this give us hope.”

Some days that hope seems in short supply. But out among violets, bogs, fens, woods, wild birdsong, slithering snakes, bees, butterflies, and native wildflowers we did find hope and brought it home with us–as well as new clues to tell apart some of the (often happily hybridizing) violets.

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Unexpected Wonder

May 22, 2026

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

On a day meant mostly for moseying, we set out for the Driftless Area hoping to find large yellow lady’s-slipper in bloom in Hayden Prairie near Lime Springs, Iowa where we’d once seen more of them in bud than I could count. We find them again easily enough–some in bud but none in flower, although the prairie shooting star were merrily blooming.

We aren’t far in our travels from where, last spring, we searched diligently (and disappointingly) for green violet, the only one of the state’s nineteen native violet species we had yet to find. This state-endangered wildflower looks nothing like its violet relatives–it can grow up to three feet tall, and its small greenish-white flowers grow on stalks from the leaf axils. If not for the name, we wouldn’t know it was a violet.

Since we’re passing through the area where we’d searched before without any luck, why not take one more look? So we do, following a trail through a depressing abundance of garlic mustard, past marsh marigolds and wild geraniums in bloom, around downed trees, steadying each other across a little creek until we come to where we had searched last year.

This time, however, we widen our search a bit. And before long, the cry goes up. Green violet!!! Two robust clusters of plants with delicate greenish-white flowers dangling from leaf axils. Celebration (and photographs) ensue.

Giddy with green violet joy, we decide to follow the trail on the other side of the creek back to the road. In high spirits we wade the creek, careful not to slip on mossy rocks, then follow the narrow bit of land between steep hillside and mucky streambed, ducking under or scrabbling over a few downed trees. When the path leads uphill we start climbing until we realize it leads straight uphill and directly away from the creek and the car to who knows where–clearly we don’t. Nothing to do but backtrack, so down the hillside we go, over and under the downed trees, across the slippery mossy rocks, past green violet (pausing for one last reverential look), around downed trees, along trail spurs that dead-end in thick brush, and back to the creek that we’re convinced has suddenly altered course when we can’t find the narrow place where we’d crossed before. Eventually, though, we find another narrow place and teeter across, coming at last to the car.

The rest of the day is fine wildflower chasing with showy orchis in bloom, green milkweed budding, plains wild indigo flowering. Wonderful as these wildflowers are, they blur together in the glow of finally finding green violet, a glow that keeps us smiling all the way back home.

How rare is green violet? Minnesota has only five known populations, all in the Driftless Area. In Iowa green violet is endangered. In Wisconsin, where green violet was thought to have disappeared completely, one population has recently been found. All of which makes it even more of a wonder that, thanks to directions from a knowledgeable friend, we actually found the rare and delicate flowers.