flowerchasers – Flower Chasers

The Unexpected Orchid

July 24, 2026

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

For some wildflower chases that we go on we might not know exactly what we’ll find, or whether the flowers (if we do find them) will be freshly blooming. For other wildflowers chases we go with coordinates that we’ve researched, information from friends, a fairly precise idea of where we might find what we’re looking for.

Either way, we know that wildflowers don’t keep an exact calendar. What we see at a certain time one year may not be blooming yet the following year or may have already gone to seed. We know, too, that the flowers we do find may not always be in prime condition for a beauty shot photo. Still, we go for the flowers whenever we can.

Last weekend we set out to find three flowers we’ve been yearning to see this year: tesselated rattlesnake plantain, round-leaved pyrola, and tall white bog orchid. We knew the tesselated rattlesnake plantain would be past prime and that the round-leaved pyrola would already be gone to seed, but we hoped for tall white bog orchid in full flowering glory.

Our first stop was down a narrow one-lane sandy road to a place where we’d once seen tesselated rattlesnake plantain leaves. The day was overcast, and the pine trees made a sound like rain that never reaches the ground. No sooner were we out of the car than we saw the white spires of two northern (very) slender ladies’-tresses with their wispy spiraling flowers already going to seed. We’d seen northern slender ladies-tresses only once before, so jubilation ensued to see them again in this new-to-us location. We also found plenty of tesselated rattlesnake plantain, mostly heading to seed but still happily growing.

Next stop: Badoura Jack Pine Scientific and Natural Area (SNA) where we were on the hunt for round-leaved pyrola, the last of the state’s seven pyrola/shinleaf that we had yet to positively identify. We’d found the coordinates in an online search in the University of Minnesota Herbarium records, and we followed them down a sandy track to where we planned to veer off into the trees. Jack pine woodland often has an open understory, but as we peered into the woods it was clear that some serious bushwhacking would be required. We can bushwhack with the best of them, but the day had turned hot and humid, and our enthusiasm for bushwhacking was at an ebb. Besides, we had not brought along our colored plastic ties, for us a bushwhacking essential.

Perhaps we could come at the coordinates from a different direction by taking a trail we had passed earlier and then heading into the woods. We backtracked to the trail and hiked past tesselated rattlesnake plantain, pipsissewa, and Hill’s thistle. But when we reached the place where we needed to turn into the woods again, bushes and undergrowth still blocked our way.

Surely, we reasoned, if round-leaved pyrola grew somewhere deep in bushwhack territory, what’s to say it didn’t grow elsewhere, too, in this part of the jack pine forest? We’d scoured the trail as we hiked, but now as we retraced our steps we looked more closely in open areas alongside the trail. Which is where, down in the pine needles and grasses, we found several stems of seed pods and the long-stalked shiny leaves of round-leaved pyrola. All seven pyrola/shinleaf seen and identified in one year–check!

Our last stop of the day was Iron Springs Bog SNA where, just at the coordinates where we’d once before seen tall white bog orchid long past prime, two tall white spires bloomed beautifully, almost as though they were waiting for Kelly to take their picture.

Our targeted searches had paid off, but we also had the thrill of an unlooked-for flower find. We might set out with maps, coordinates, helpful hints–and then, just beyond the car door, we might find two unexpected northern slender ladies’-tresses growing.

Which is one of the reasons we do what we do: for the surprise of delight.

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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.