Searching for Minnesota’s Native Wildflowers – Page 5

First Flower Chasing of 2024

March 23, 2024

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

After a year of thirty thousand words, 275 photos, and 6,000 miles crisscrossing the state, we have finally finished a working draft of our next (as yet untitled) wildflower book! So what do we do to celebrate?

What else but go flower chasing?

It’s been a chancy spring after an almost snow-free winter. Snow had finally fallen on our first free weekend from working on the book, but we couldn’t resist the urge to be outside and looking for wildflowers . We’d heard about a hillside covered in snow trillium south of the cities, and even though we’ve seen snow trilliums, a flower of state special concern, in several places over the years, we are always excited to see old flower friends in new places.

The snow had mostly disappeared as we drove south, but the day was cold, and the ground on the hillside felt frozen underfoot. Still, poking up through last year’s oak leaves were undaunted trios of trillium leaves, a few plants with buds almost ready to open, others with buds smaller than a grain of rice, some with no buds at all yet. Scattered among the trilliums were tiny, reddish false rue anemone leaves and the purplish-red leaves of last year’s hepatica along with a few, very small, unfolding fronds of Dutchman’s breeches. Ephemeral or not, the early wildflowers were already hard at work.

Not far away at Kasota Prairie Preserve pasqueflowers were still blooming, so we headed over to see them, too. Some were past prime, others still a pale lavender, and a few were barely buds, all furry with soft hairs to help hold in heat. Pasqueflowers are clearly sun lovers: on cloudy days their blossoms stay closed, and on sunny days they follow the sun, a slow dance called heliotropism which helps the flowers trap the sun’s heat. Early queen bees flying from warm flower to warm flower gather pollen and warmth at the same time.

One last stop at Ottawa Bluffs Nature Conservancy site took us up a hill topped with burr oaks, past more pasqueflowers than a person could count to a panoramic view over the river valley.

We are always delighted by these first flowers and the promise of more to follow. Most of all we are delighted to be out and about again, chasing wildflowers wherever we can find them.

Gentian Glory

September 16, 2023

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

Autumn shows its own colors–the waxy red bulbous seed pods of prickly pear cactus, the translucent seed pods of partridge pea, the purplish red of sumac and the gold of prairie grasses, the frilly blues and whites of so many kinds of asters whose names we don’t yet know.

And the vivid blue of downy gentians.

Downy gentians open to the sun–you won’t find them blooming brightly on cloudy days, and if you wait too late on a sunny day to photograph one, you may find it closing with the waning sunlight (we know, we waited too long once).

On a morning of late prairie splendor we go looking for downy gentians on a hillside and find first one, then another, and then so many we quit counting them all. The plants nestle down in the grass, shaded enough that they’re still closed when we begin to spot them–but not so tightly closed that a bumblebee can’t force her way in and back out again. As the sun rises higher, the blossoms unfold until we’re surrounded by a motherlode of brilliant gentian blue.

We wander the rest of the prairie. A snake crawls across the path. Wind sways the grasses. The blue sky opens overhead.

Any time is a good time to be on a prairie, but this morning is especially glorious.

Glorious with gentians.

See more of Minnesota’s native gentians HERE!

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.