flowerchasers – Page 8 – Flower Chasers

Ladies’-Tresses Perplexes

August 31, 2023

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

We’ve been on a search for Minnesota’s five different ladies’-tresses orchids that are findable (southern slender ladies’-tresses hasn’t been seen in Minnesota in 100 years, so we’re not really looking for it here). We were briefly ecstatic to see a “new” one listed, sphinx ladies’-tresses, until a friend told us it was really just nodding ladies’-tresses under a new name.

We’ve found nodding (or, now, sphinx) ladies’-tresses in a wet part of Blaine Preserve Scientific and Natural Area (SNA). We’ve seen both Case’s ladies’-tresses and also northern slender ladies’-tresses on top of a huge hill of dirt dug up decades ago to get to the iron ore below. We spotted Great Plains ladies’-tresses in vigorous bloom on a goat prairie at King’s and Queen’s Bluffs SNA. And on a roadside in Pennington County in northern Minnesota a few weeks back we saw hooded ladies’-tresses blooming.

When flower chasing brought us north again a few weeks later we stopped by that same roadside to check on the hooded ladies’-tresses and found almost no sign of them except for a couple of plants gone to seed. What we did see blooming were a few similar-but-not quite-the-same spiraling white orchids, and we puzzled over them. Shaggy hooded ladies’-tresses on their way to seed? Nodding ladies’-tresses? Great Plains ladies’-tresses?

It’s easy to confuse nodding and Great Plains ladies’-tresses. We know. We’ve done it. The flowers look similar and bloom at overlapping times in wetter places, although Great Plains ladies’-tresses also blooms in drier, gravelly habitats. We’ve read that Great Plains ladies’-tresses smells like almonds, but to our non-botanical noses both flowers smell pretty much the same. To complicate things, distribution maps for the two don’t show either one in Pennington county. Maps, of course, can be mistaken, but so can we.

The next day in a ditch in Clay county we saw several of the same blooming ladies’-tresses and puzzled some more. The only clue we could find was that the blooming plants didn’t appear to have any leaves, and since Great Plains ladies’-tresses loses its leaves before blooming, we tentatively identified them as Great Plains. (Later we found that Great Plains ladies’-tresses is listed as being in Clay county while nodding ladies’-tresses is not, which helped strengthen our identification.) Are we right? We don’t know. We didn’t really stress over which ladies’-tresses we saw, but they were a mystery. In the end, finding any ladies’-tresses blooming gracefully in places wet or dry, whether or not we know its name, is always a delight.

Purple and Golden Glory

August 19, 2023

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

Late summer flowers are gracing the prairie in purples and yellows. One morning before dawn we headed east to Lost Valley Prairie Scientific and Natural Area (SNA) to catch the early morning light. The sun didn’t disappoint, sending long rays across the prairie by the time we arrived. Dew sparkled on the grasses and flowers, and the top of one hill was dotted with dotted blazing stars blooming brightly. (All five of Minnesota’s blazing stars grow in this SNA, and we saw four of them that morning–cylindric, northern plains, rough, and dotted.)

The valley between two bluffs was a sea of goldenrod. For years we’ve simply nodded at any kind of goldenrod we saw and said, “Yep, that a solidago.” This year we decided we would tackle learning to tell Minnesota’s eighteen different goldenrods apart, and what better time to try to learn them than when hills and prairies are turning gold?

Some goldenrods are easier to identify than others. Upland white goldenrod is a slam-dunk, the only non-golden goldenrod. Riddell’s goldenrod has long, arching leaves that fold in on themselves. Hairy goldenrod has hairy leaves and stem. Cliff goldenrod usually grows on cliffs, bog goldenrod in bogs.

A few still elude us, though, even with a cheat sheet we’ve created from information in guide books and web sites. Unfortunately, a frequent description for identifying characteristics is “variable.” Toothiness? Variable. Height? Variable. Flower cluster shape? Variable. We suspect (and a little online research confirms) that at least some goldenrods hybridize promiscuously, which might account for some of the variations and for our confusion.

But we’re determined. We think we can now tell Canada goldenrod from tall goldenrod, and we’re pretty sure about giant goldenrod, whose leaves seem exceptionally toothy.

The next afternoon we headed west to Yellow Bank Hills SNA, arriving in time to catch the long, low light of evening. near the western edge of the state, arriving in time to catch the long, low light of evening on the goldenrods and sunflowers that filled the site’s low areas. On the hillsides blazing stars, both dotted and northern plains, bloomed in purple glory. We wandered the dry hill prairie until the light left, then headed to our camper cabin at Lac Qui Parle State Park, where the stars in the night sky blazed like brilliant white flowers in a vast, dark prairie.

See more of what we are seeing now…..

Spotting Spotted Coralroot

July 23, 2023

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

We’ve been chasing spotted coralroot this summer with no luck, so it was high on our list of what we hoped to see when we headed north this past weekend. We even had coordinates for places where it had been seen blooming recently. Surely this time we would find it.

We’ve found several populations of the similar-looking Western spotted coralroot. And while they are different flowers, they are also close look-alikes, and telling them apart can be challenging. We’ve finally learned to look closely at the lower lip of the tiny 1/2 inch flowers–western spotted coralroot’s lip flares out at the bottom while spotted coralroot’s lip is more rectangular, a difference that takes close examination.

Stop after stop, as we drove up the north shore, our luck for finding flowers on our want-to-see list ran strong: American beach grass on Point Pine Forest, berries on female Canada buffaloberry bushes farther north, lesser purple fringed orchid in a ditch farther north still. A hike up to Bear and Bean Lake led us past our first-ever pinesap, and in Taconite harbor we found early saxifrage leaves that we’ll return to earlier next year to try to catch in flower.

All along the way, as we drove down roads and hiked down trails, as we followed GPS coordinates to impossible-for-us-to-bushwhack-through thickets, we searched for spotted coralroot without luck. We found several bunches of western spotted coralroot and one pale yellow coralroot that looked so much like autumn coralroot we checked to see if autumn coralroot grew that far north. It doesn’t. Perhaps this was a yellow version of western spotted coralroot? We didn’t know, we only knew it wasn’t the spotted coralroot we were searching for. More days, more miles, more stops, more flowers. But no spotted coralroot.

On our last morning we had one final stop to try. All we needed, we told ourselves, was one spotted coralroot in bloom. Just one.

And one is what we found, blooming alongside a trail at Savanna Portage State Park. Close examination revealed that yes, the flower lip was square. Yes, it was spotted coralroot. Cheers (and photographs) ensued.

Chasing wildflowers, we live in hope. After three days and 740 miles seeing even more native wildflowers than we could have imagined, including the elusive spotted coralroot, we drove happily, hopefully home.