Category: Minnesota Wildflowers

September 25, 2022

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

Even before reaching the top of the hills at Yellow Bank Hills Scientific and Natural Area (SNA) at the far western edge of the state we are blasted by wind.  Wind bends the yellowing grasses into waves and tosses the field sagewort into a crazy dance party.  Wind frosts whitecaps on the lake on the western edge of the SNA. Dry grasses crunch underfoot, but the sound is almost drowned by the wind.

It’s a gorgeous day to be out on the prairie.

We’ve come here to try to track down velvety goldenrod (solidago mollis), a state special concern flower, listed as growing at this SNA in a small population at the very eastern edge of its range.  This fall we’ve been on the hunt for all of Minnesota’s eighteen goldenrods, which for years we’ve just clumped together as “Yep, that’s a solidago.” Now we’re determined to sort them out in all their golden glory, and what better time of year than September? We’ve already identified roughly half of the goldenrods, and a stop at Cedar Rock SNA on our way west has netted us Riddell’s goldenrod (solidago riddelli) with its long, narrow, beautifully arching leaves, past its prime but still clearly a Riddell’s. We’ve been to Yellow Bank Hills before in search of velvety goldenrod with no luck; this time we plan to search every bit of the SNA’s 78 acres or get swept away by the wind, whichever comes first.

Hills roll across the southern part of the SNA. Here and there a glacial erratic rock glitters beneath a covering of grey-green lichen. Flowers are mostly gone to seed, with a few purple and white asters still blooming along with the bright yellow of an occasional hairy false goldenaster.  Goldenrods are scattered around the southern end of the SNA, but none of them fits the clues for which we’re searching. We have plenty of clues: velvety goldenrod is short (6”-24”), is said to have has ovoid or blunt grey-green leaves, has usually lost its basal leaves by bloom time, and has dense hairs on its leaves and stem which have a velvety feel. Now all we need is a goldenrod that has read the same guidebooks we have.

Having scoured the southern end, we wander into the northern end, where seemingly endless goldenrods, many past prime, grow in the lower, moister areas.  Gauging height can be a challenge, since we frequently have to lift a wind-flattened goldenrod to see how tall it is.   We lift. We peer for blunt or ovoid grey-green stem leaves. We feel for velvety surfaces. All the while the wind whips our hair, pausing now and then as if to inhale, then blasting away again.  Wind is an integral part of prairie, but this feels like more wind than we’ve ever encountered before while flower chasing. 

After what seem like thousands and thousands of goldenrod perusals, we are almost on our way back to the car when we come upon a small population of goldenrods that looks just a little different from all the ones we’ve seen so far.  These plants are short, have grey-green leaves (although the tips look more pointed than blunt), and have softly hairy stems. Could this possibly be velvety goldenrod?

We have recently fallen in love (or at least serious like) with a cell phone app that gives its best guess at plants about which we are uncertain.  The app is sometimes right, sometimes not, sometimes so vague as to be unhelpful, but this time it confirms that we are looking at velvety goldenrod.  We’re still not completely convinced, but I take notes and GPS coordinates so we can return to this spot next year when the flowers are in full bloom. Kelly takes photographs.

A windy and sunny prairie is hard for photography, but I hold tightly to the sun diffuser screen (so it–and I– don’t blow away) and shade the plant while Kelly waits to click pictures when the wind to pauses.  Then, hopeful that we might have added another goldenrod to our growing list of ones we recognize, we head for the car and the long drive home.

Flowerchasing season is short, goldenrod season even shorter.  If we don’t find all eighteen goldenrods this year, there’s always next year, but finding what we think is velvety goldenrod makes us hopeful that we might, someday, find them all.

September 18, 2022

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

Even in mid-September there’s plenty of flower-chasing yet to do. On a partly overcast Sunday morning we set out to see if we could chase down one of Minnesota’s last orchids of the year to bloom, Great Plains ladies’-tresses, whose small white flowers spiral around a stem.  Great Plains ladies’-tresses looks similar to nodding ladies’-tresses, but one way to distinguish between the two is by their smell:  Great Plains ladies’-tresses, according to one guide book, smells like almonds.  Another way to tell the difference is by their habitat.  Great Plains ladies’-tresses is one of only three Minnesota orchids specific to prairie, along with western prairie fringed orchid and small white lady’s-slipper. We hoped to find the orchids in a goat prairie at King’s and Queen’s Bluff Scientific and Natural Area (SNA), where they are listed as growing.  The SNA is part of Great River Bluffs State Park, so we headed southeast through early light that silvered the waters of the Mississippi River and Lake Pepin.

The entrance into the park passed through prairie colored yellow with goldenrod and purple and white with asters.  We’ve been trying to learn all the goldenrods in the state (Minnesota Wildflowers lists 18 of them), and we’d gotten up to four we were pretty sure we could recognize and one more we were absolutely sure of– upland white goldenrod, the only white goldenrod in the state.) We stopped along the prairie drive and figured out another:  the bright plumes of showy goldenrod.  

And on those showy goldenrods a surprise –hundreds of monarch butterflies, orange and black wings dark against the golden flowers.  We ventured into the prairie a bit, careful not to disturb the feeding monarchs, and discovered another surprise, a multitude of cream gentian still blooming. Many flowers were beginning to brown, but some were still a pale yellow, their blossoms like little bunched bouquets. Already the day was a delight.  What would the goat prairie hold?

The path to the goat prairie led through woods, where we identified another goldenrod, elm-leaved goldenrod whose shape makes us think of fountains or fireworks.  Reddish-brown berries of Solomon’s seal and vivid red clusters of Jack-in-the-pulpit seeds brightened the forest floor, and ghost pipe gleamed palely under white pines. The goat prairie, when we came to it on one side of the path, was true to its name:  a hillside that fell away so steeply you needed to be as sure-footed as a goat to traverse it. Here, too, goldenrod and aster bloomed, and monarchs flitted among them. 

We kept to the path, which ended in a stunning overlook of the Mississippi river and surrounding bluffs. There, in the short prairie grasses next to the path, we found Great Plains ladies’-tresses, freshly opened flowers curving in bright white spires. When I knelt down to smell one, the flowers really did smell sweetly of almonds. 

Whenever we’re out flower chasing, it’s hard to quit after just one place, and since one of our favorite SNAs, Mound Prairie, wasn’t far away, we decided to check it out.  Mound Prairie SNA is made up of three goat prairies rising above the surrounding countryside, and here, too, we discovered Great Plains ladies’-tresses in bloom along with asters, goldenrod, and a few last brightly yellow partridge pea flowers.

Not much farther down the highway Magelssen Park towers above Rushford, so we decided to  stop there, too, to see if we could find cliff goldenrod among the rocks.  No cliff goldenrod to be seen (that we could identify, anyway), but even more Great Plains ladies’-tresses welcomed us in the brown and yellow grasses of a remnant goat prairie.  

With plenty of daylight left, and with Pin Oak Prairie SNA almost on our way home, why not make one last stop to see what else might be blooming or gone to glorious seed? The reason why not became evident as soon as we turned down the road toward Pin Oak Prairie SNA and discovered that the bridge across a little river was under construction.  With no other easy route to reach the SNA, we decided maybe it really was time to head home. So we did.  We’ll be going out again to look for more fall flowers and seeds, but in a year when we’ve finally managed to see all of the possible orchids in Minnesota, ending our orchid year with a hat trick of Great Plains ladies’-tresses felt, well, as sweet as the smell of almonds.

August 26, 27 and 28, 2022

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

Come fall, Minnesota’s prairies turn yellow with goldenrods, sneezeweed, sunflowers. Deeper down in the grass, blue blossoms open—Minnesota has seven different species of blue gentians.  Over the years we’d seen all but one of them, pleated gentian, a state special concern flower, and because it’s gentian time we headed to northwestern Minnesota where pleated gentian’s been known to grow in saline prairie.  As we drove, we realized our route would take us close to Badoura Jack Pine Woodland, a Scientific and Natural Area (SNA) that we’d visited last summer when drought parched the state, so we veered from our planned route to visit it again.  

Even with the ground crunching underfoot last year, we’d been intrigued by the open woodland under the tall jack pine trees, which only regenerate after fire releases their seeds.  Under those trees we’d been surprised and delighted to find tessellated rattlesnake plantain blooming.

Now as we stepped into the woodland, the mossy ground felt soft, and green surrounded us.  This time, too, we found several tessellated rattlesnake plantain plants, their spires gone to seed and their distinctive leaves withered and brown. Lowbush blueberries, snowberries, and bearberries ripened, making a feast for any passing bear (luckily, none passed us, although last week we did see a bear cross the road as we drove through a wildlife management area).  We lingered in the Jack Pine woodland, a habitat critically imperiled in Minnesota and rare worldwide. But we had a pleated gentian to find, and so eventually we continued on.

Once we came to the small prairie where we’d heard pleated gentian grew, it didn’t take long to find six of the plants nestled in the grass, delicate and small but blooming beautifully. We spent the rest of the afternoon scouring nearby prairies that had saline habitat, but we had no luck finding any more pleated gentians. 

One last stop before finding a place for the night was a prairie where we’d once seen what we thought was lesser fringed gentian, and we couldn’t resist a stop to see if the flowers were still there—and if they were, indeed, the lesser fringed gentian.  (When we’d worked on our first wildflower book we had initially identified a greated fringed gentian as a lesser one–the two species look similar, grow in the same habitats, and have an overlapping range of height.) Roscoe Prairie SNA lists lesser fringed gentian, so we planned to stop there on our way home the next day to try to figure the fringed gentians out.

Next morning was a pure prairie morning. Rain in the night had left the air sweet and fresh, and Ottertail Prairie SNA, where we stopped for one more pleated gentian search, blazed with sunflowers and the vivid blue of countless bottle gentians. Monarchs filled the air, flying from northern blazing star to northern blazing star.  We didn’t find any pleated gentians, but deep in the prairie we came across a willow tree where hundreds and hundreds of monarchs clung fluttering to the leaves.  Later we learned that we were looking at a roost, something that monarchs, who migrate singly, will sometimes form at night along their journey. All wildflower searching paused as we stood in wonder watching monarchs come and go.

Roscoe Prairie SNA did indeed reveal many fringed gentians along a ditch.  Based on our research of the difference in plant height, length of the fringe on flower petals, and width of leaves (everything is a little lesser on lesser fringed gentians) we determined that these were indeed lesser fringed gentians.  And beautiful.

We still weren’t done with gentians, though.  More research revealed that cream gentian, which we’d only ever seen growing in a park, was blooming wild in a ditch down along highway 56 in southern Minnesota, so after a night in our own beds we headed out again.  The rain poured down mile after mile after mile, and we fretted that the flowers might not even be open, since at least some gentians open in the sun and close at night or when the sky clouds over.  Luckily, cream gentian blossoms are almost as closed as bottle gentians, so they don’t have much opening to do.  Luckier still, the rain stopped just as we spotted the cream gentians alongside the road, far too many to count (I tried), and gloriously cream-colored in the wet morning.

Pleated gentians, bottle gentians, lesser fringed gentians, and cream gentians.  Not to mention a tree full of butterflies. 

A pretty-much perfect weekend of wildflower chasing.