Tag: #flowerchasers

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.

Bloodroot
False rue anemone
Cutleaf toothwort
Dutchman’s breeches
Trout lily
Mayapple
Spring beauty
Sharp-lobed hepatica
Canadian wild ginger
Beaver work
Beaver dam

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.  

Cases ladies’-tresses,
St. Louis County
Northern slender ladies’-tresses, St. Louis County
Nodding ladies’-tresses,
Cook County
Great Plains ladies’-tresses, Winona County
Hooded ladies’-tresses, Pennington County
Great Plains ladies’-tresses? Pennington County

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.  

American beach grass
Canada buffaloberry
Lesser purple fringed orchid
Pinesap
Early saxifrage
What coralroot?
What coralroot?
Western spotted coralroot in seed
Spotted coralroot


To see more of what we are seeing now CLICK HERE!