Searching for Minnesota’s Native Wildflowers – Page 4

Pursuing Putty-root

November 24, 2024

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

On a day when fall’s colors have mostly faded and fallen, we go looking for putty-root orchid–not the orchid’s flowers, which are long done blooming, but their distinctive leaves, one to a plant.

Why look for putty-root orchid leaves when there are no flowers? In Minnesota, putty-root grows in the deciduous forests of the southeast part of the state. Although its flowers don’t need sun, its leaves do. And sun only really reaches the forest floor in the fall when trees have lost their leaves and also in the following spring before the trees leaf out. Putty-root’s flowers themselves are delicate and hard to spot, so finding the long, green, pleated-looking, striped leaves in fall (and remembering where we found them) is the best way we know to find putty-root flowers the following spring. Once the plants flower, the leaves will die and new ones grow again the following fall.

We’ve looked long and closely for putty-root leaves in several places, but this time we’re searching in a new-to-us location: Louisville Swamp Trail in the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge.

The morning is chilly and gray. Almost all of the leaves are off the trees, but we’re amazed to still see so much color. American bittersweet vines with their bright orange fruits sprawl alongside the path. Sumac berries have turned a deep red. Splotches of grey and mustard-colored lichens brighten a dead branch. Green moss cushions rocks. Yellow-orange berries indicate horse gentian plants, but early horse gentian or late horse gentian? Whether in flower or fruit, the two horse gentians continue to flummox us.

Under the tree branches we begin our search in earnest for putty-root leaves. We look, we look, we look–and then we find them, obligingly standing upright among the brown oak leaves covering the ground. Kelly takes photos, I count at least eleven separate putty-root leaves, and we note the location and jubilantly plan to return in spring to see the flowers.

And really, it’s only a few months until flower chasing season begins again. We’re happy to wait while the putty-root leaves soak up sunlight, while the earth orbits the sun and days grow longer and warmer again until spring when, with any luck, we’ll find putty-root orchid flowers blooming.

A very good thing to hope for in the darkening time of the year.

Stop by our Holiday Show on December 7, 2024, from 9 a.m to 4 p.m. to talk wildflowers, hear more about our upcoming book, Chasing Wildflowers, or purchase one of Phyllis’s children’s book or our book, Searching for Minnesota’s Native Wildflowers….email flowerchasersmn@gmail.com for all the details!

A Flower Chaser Fall

October 11, 2024

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

Fall offers fewer and fewer blooming wildflowers to chase, so early one morning we head out to Morton Outcrops Scientific and Natural Area (SNA) to look for a different kind of color: lichens. Lichens aren’t plants—they’re a relationship between fungi, algae, and sometimes cyanobacteria, and Minnesota has as many as a thousand different kinds. For help in identification we bring along our copy of Lichens of the North Woods by Joe Walewski. We arrive just after the sun is rising and wander among granite outcrops 3.6 billions years old, some of the oldest rock on our planet. Splotches of orange, gray, brown, green and yellow dot the pink-and-gray rippled rock, and we tentatively identify yellow cobblestone lichen and rock greenshield lichen.

The year is far enough into fall that it’s possible to wander places we couldn’t get to earlier in the season without thrashing through undergrowth, and we like to avoid thrashing whenever we can. Now we can easily visit the northeastern edge of the old quarry in the SNA, where cubes of blasted rocks are piled up like a giant’s building blocks and wind ripples the water in the bottom of the quarry.

We aren’t many miles from Gneiss Outcrops SNA, so we drive on west to revisit it. In a previous summer visit we were defeated by tall, thick growth (think thrashing) and barely got past the first outcrop near the edge of the SNA. Now much of that growth has died back, and we head toward a lake on the far edge of the SNA following trampled trails in the grasses, making our way around thickets of bushes and trees. The hike is longer than it looks on the map, but at last we spot water and follow a narrow trail through thorny branches down to a small lake where a swan rests white on the water. A ridge of rocks leads up the other side of the lake, and a short climb brings us past brittle prickly pear cactus growing in rock cracks and plains prickly pear cactus sprawled across ledges. One way cactus survives our Minnesota winters is to lose water, shrinking into shriveled pads until spring when those pads swell again, and these cactuses are definitely shrinking.

It’s amazing what color you can find, even when most of the flowers have died back or gone to seed–lichen dappling rock, a few goldenrods still blooming, deep red sumac leaves and berries, flecks of quartz sparkling, little bluestem glowing red in the sunlight, trees along the road turning golden. And amazing what you might find if you just push on and even thrash a little through the undergrowth and trees–even a lake with cactuses growing on the rocks and a swan resting on the water.

Buds and Blossoms

April 20, 2024

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

No matter what sort of winter we have, we always hunger for spring. Down along Minnehaha Creek in Minneapolis below the falls, bloodroot are blooming, skunk cabbage is already spreading its cabbage-like leaves, and trillium are budding. We love this city springtime, but we wondered, too, what might be happening farther from home. So on a day so blustery we needed winter coats we headed out to see what might be blooming farther south in Minnesota.

At Whitewater State Park we found more buds than blooms, but buds make our hearts happy, too, since soon enough blossoms will follow. Because the day was overcast and chilly, many of the flowers were wrapped up tight against the gloom and cold. Bloodroot held its leaves upright around tightly closed buds, but false rue anemone braved the weather to scatter white flowers among last year’s brown leaves, and a few cutleaf toothwort flowers opened while many more budded. Dutchman’s breeches’ britches-shaped flowers swayed on their stalks, and several trout lily buds hung gracefully down among many, many trout lily leaves. Masses of mayapple rocketed through the ground like missile nose cones, a few with buds nestled between their leaves. (Like trout lilies, mayapple plants only bloom once the plant has two leaves.)

Spring beauty’s delicate pink flowers delighted, and hepatica opened pale blossoms with fuzzy bracts at the bases of the petals. Trillium leaves poked up, beginning to unfold and Canadian wild ginger flowers hid under their soft wrinkly leaves. A little creek churkled along until it encountered several beaver dams, where it pooled up behind the mud and stick structures. Beavers, it turns out, are not only excellent engineers but also help prevent the spread of forest fires and ameliorate drought by creating wetlands with their dams.

We’d set out not knowing what we might find, and despite the cold (and a smattering of snowflakes) a whole budding world awaited us.

With windy arms, spring welcomed us in.