Flower Chasers

Signs of Hope

March 14, 2025

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

On a day when almost all of the latest (and maybe last) snowfall has melted and the temperature tops seventy degrees Fahrenheit, we go looking for signs of spring.

Skunk cabbage has been poking up above ground for at least a week, but skunk cabbage is an overachiever, creating its own heat to melt its way free of the ground. Now we’re on the lookout for the next early flowers, snow trillium and pasqueflower.

Snow trillium is the smallest of Minnesota’s four trilliums and also a species of state special concern, which the Department of Natural Resources defines as “extremely uncommon in Minnesota, or has unique or highly specific habitat requirements.” A species to keep an eye on.

Not only is snow trillium small, it’s a plant that can take twelve years or more to flower. Finding its graceful white three-petaled blossoms is always a delight and a sure sign that wildflower season is beginning.

We don’t find the flowers yet, but we do find a very few, very tiny green shoots, one of them smaller than a grain of rice. But it’s enough to reassure us that they are coming, and we’ll come back soon to see snow trillium in full (and brief) flower.

Next stop: River Terrace Prairie Scientific and Natural Area (SNA) to check for pasqueflower, those lovely purple prairie anemones. As we drive down the dirt road to the SNA a bluebird flies in front of us, another sign of spring. On the hilltop at River Terrace Prairie we find still more signs: the small furry nubbins of pasqueflower emerging like little brown noses, along with prairie smoke leaves beginning to green. Farther down the hillside we find what we tentatively identify as last year’s kittentails gone to seed, even though we’ve read that kittentails stalks wither after blooming, leaving just the basal rosette of leaves behind. But these are times of change, so we wonder if flowers are changing, too, in response to the changing climate. If these are kittentails, they clearly don’t care what we’ve read about withering after blooming–they follow their own wildflower ways.

Just being out on a glorious day under a sky streaked with high white wisps of clouds and seeing spring makes its sweet way under trees and over prairies fills up our hearts that are hungry for springtime and hope.

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.

Flower Chasers

Signs of Hope

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Pursuing Putty-root

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A Flower Chaser Fall

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