flowerchasers – Page 3 – Flower Chasers

Keweenaw Adventure Day One

June 22, 2025

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

It’s been a while since we’ve gone on a flower-chasing adventure, and we’re excited to be heading out for one this week in Copper Harbor, Michigan. Two years ago, I took an incredible wildflower class with the same instructor on Isle Royale, and we’re excited now to learn more about the flora of the Keweenaw peninsula. Flowers don’t stop at borders, and neither do we.

Our class starts on Tuesday, but we’ve left on Sunday for some pre-game wildflower chasing. First stop: Falls Creek Scientific and Natural Area (SNA) where we do a quick search for two orchids we’ve seen there in the past. Just off the trail we find lily-leaved twayblade in fresh bloom, and a little farther along we come across the distinctive patterned leaves of downy rattlesnake plantain, a native orchid that blooms later in the season. Two orchids before nine-thirty in the morning–we are off to a good start.

Our planned route takes us past Kissick Swamp Wildlife Area near Hayward, Wisconsin, a State Natural Area with over one hundred native plants, including fourteen species of orchid. (On previous visits we managed, with help from a knowledgeable friend, to see thirteen of them.) The heart of the swamp for us is a ten-acre lake with a bog mat around the edges. We are barely down the hill into the swamp when we come across a friendly fellow swamp explorer and decide to trek along together beside the lake.

The bog holds the usual boggish suspects: pitcher plant, tufted loosestrife, bog rosemary, small cranberry, round-leaved sundew, three-leaf false Solomon’s-seal, bog buckbean, and mosses in reds and greens that squish soggily underfoot.

What we’ve come for, though, are the orchids, and we find them–scatterings of rose pogonia, dragon’s mouth, and tuberous grass-pink. Stemless lady’s-slipper seems to be everywhere, from fresh blooms to flowers fading away, and at least one showy lady’s slipper is in delicate pale pink bud. While I’m trying to hold the sunshade for Kelly to photograph a rose pogonia alongside the water, the edge of the bog mat gives way under my foot, plunging my leg into the lake up to my hip. In the 91-degree Fahrenheit heat, it’s possible my fellow flower chasers are slightly envious of my sudden refreshment.

Along the trail we come across the carcass of a turtle, mostly shell now, where red-spotted admiral and northern crescent butterflies are puddling. We’ve seen butterflies puddle before in mud, sipping up the salts and minerals that the males need to help with reproductive success. According to an internet search they also sip from decaying animals for the same reason–which reminds us of how everything is connected, even if we don’t always know how.

Almost at the end of the small lake we come upon the grand finale of orchids–a mossy and watery bit of habitat where, among many rose pogonia, tuberous grass-pink, and dragon’s mouth orchids, tall white bog orchid spires make an elegant and regal appearance.

It would have been easy for us to decide to bypass Kissick Swamp in the fairly ferocious heat and drive on in air-conditioned comfort, but we are so glad we didn’t (although next time we’ll work even harder to stay hydrated). Even in places we’ve visited before we never know who we’ll meet or what we’ll find among familiar flower faces.

Our goal for the night is a motel in Silver City, Michigan, and after miles of driving along forested roads and through small towns we come suddenly to Lake Superior in all its waving wonder. Lakeside, the temperature is seventy-one degrees, and from our room we can see and hear the waves rolling in.

A splendid end to a splendid day. And a sweet way to fall asleep to the sound of Lake Superior.

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Violets Revisited

May 26, 2025

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

The time for violet chasing is short, and we’ve been on the hunt this spring to see all of Minnesota’s eighteen violets while they’re blooming. Which is a correction from our last violet blog, when we wrote that there were twenty different Minnesota violets. A reclassification of Minnesota violets in 2023 took the number down to eighteen members of the genus viola plus green violet which belongs to the genus cubelium instead of viola, is state-endangered, and whose picture looks, to our non-botanist eyes, nothing much like the other violets. And which, despite diligent searching, we have yet to see.

When we wrote the last post we’d managed to see ten viola violets –arrow-leaved, birdfoot, common blue, lance-leaved, marsh, northern white, prairie, smooth yellow, western Canada, and yellow prairie (state-threatened).

We are happy to report that we have now seen the other eight viola violets. Here’s how it happened.

Two weekends ago we headed up to Duluth for a joint event with Zenith Books and The Tasting Room, stopping along the way at Magney-Snively Natural Area where we found Carolina spring beauty (which we’d also been chasing this spring). After book-and-tea time with fellow wildflower enthusiasts we visited nearby Hartley Nature Center where we came across Great Lakes violet and sweet white violet– numbers eleven and twelve. At Stony Point, our next stop, we found violet number thirteen–great spurred violet.

After visits with family and friends we headed back to the cities, still on the hunt for violets.

First stop: Stub Trail at Fall Lake Campground in the Superior National Forest, where dog violet grew along a trail–violet number fourteen. Then off to Sax Zim Bog where we found violet number fifteen, kidney-leaved violet, growing near a bog boardwalk. At Jay Cooke State Park we clambered down along uptilted rocks by the river to find sand violet–number sixteen.

This past weekend we set out to finish the list with the last two violets. In an Anoka sandplain wetland we found an abundance of primrose-leaved violets–violet number seventeen. One to go: northern bog violet. But despite scouring trails in southeastern Minnesota we saw barely any violets at all, although we did see our first blooming orchid of the year, showy orchis.

Thanks to a friend telling us about a site closer to home we did find northern bog violet blooming cheerily along with a few small yellow lady’s-slipper and small white lady’s slipper nearby. Violet number eighteen and blooming orchids two and three. (Can you tell I like to count?)

A violet-filled springtime of chasing down all Minnesota’s viola violets and a chance to see the world awakening to spring. Next year, who knows? We might actually find green violet.

As a bonus, we’ve come up with a slogan for our next protest sign:

Violets, not violence.

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Counting (Shooting) Stars

May 10, 2025

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

In our continuing search for all of Minnesota’s twenty violets, we set out last weekend to try to find state-endangered eastern green violet, one of the rarest flowers in the state, known in only a few places.

We scaled steep ravines, slipped and slid down dry rocky creek beds, wandered alongside (and got our hiking boots wet in) still-running creeks.
Did we find eastern green violet?

We did not. But we saw plenty of common blue violet along with cutleaf toothwort, eastern false rue anemone, Jack-in-the-pulpit, trout lily, Canadian wild ginger, mayapple in bud, Virginia spring beauty, drooping trillium, wild geranium, wild blue phlox, and marsh marigolds in brilliant yellow bloom.

We were close enough to Maglessen Bluff Park for a quick trip to see if the jeweled shooting stars, in bud last weekend, were blooming now. They were, their bright magenta petals folding back, so we decided on a different quest. We would try to see all of Minnesota’s shooting stars in a day instead.

All two of them.

Jeweled shooting star blooms April to May on limestone cliffs in hardwood forests and occasionally in goat prairies. Flowers are almost always a rosy purple-to-pink, very rarely white.

Prairie shooting star blooms April to June in open prairies and savannas with flowers that look very much like jeweled shooting star except that they are almost always pale or white. In Minnesota, though, habitat for prairie shooting star has been reduced so much that only a single known population in a roadside ditch remains. We don’t want to stress this last remnant in any way, even with a quick visit, so we headed down instead across the Iowa border to Hayden Prairie just a few miles from Lime Springs, Iowa. This 240-acre state preserve is considered one of Iowa’s best prairie remnants, a place where on previous visits we’ve seen abundant blooms of the same prairie shooting star that grows in Minnesota.

As we neared the prairie we saw a scene that’s become familiar to us: burned-over land. Prescribed fire burns away dried grasses and returns nutrients to the soil, but we’re never sure what we’ll see when a site has been recently burned. Would prairie shooting star still bloom after the fire?

The answer was yes. An abundance of plants was growing in places where we’d never noticed them before. Most plants were still in bud, but a few had pale flowers open. So our quest was complete: all two shooting stars in one day. Check.

We did see a violet, too, one that we’ve seen before–prairie violet. So our count of violets seen is still ten out of twenty. We’ll continue our search for as many violets as we can find, but we’ll come back to Hayden Prairie, too, to see the prairie responding after the fire.