May 10, 2025
Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo
In our continuing search for all of Minnesota’s twenty violets, we set out last weekend to try to find state-endangered eastern green violet, one of the rarest flowers in the state, known in only a few places.
We scaled steep ravines, slipped and slid down dry rocky creek beds, wandered alongside (and got our hiking boots wet in) still-running creeks.
Did we find eastern green violet?
We did not. But we saw plenty of common blue violet along with cutleaf toothwort, eastern false rue anemone, Jack-in-the-pulpit, trout lily, Canadian wild ginger, mayapple in bud, Virginia spring beauty, drooping trillium, wild geranium, wild blue phlox, and marsh marigolds in brilliant yellow bloom.
We were close enough to Maglessen Bluff Park for a quick trip to see if the jeweled shooting stars, in bud last weekend, were blooming now. They were, their bright magenta petals folding back, so we decided on a different quest. We would try to see all of Minnesota’s shooting stars in a day instead.
All two of them.
Jeweled shooting star blooms April to May on limestone cliffs in hardwood forests and occasionally in goat prairies. Flowers are almost always a rosy purple-to-pink, very rarely white.
Prairie shooting star blooms April to June in open prairies and savannas with flowers that look very much like jeweled shooting star except that they are almost always pale or white. In Minnesota, though, habitat for prairie shooting star has been reduced so much that only a single known population in a roadside ditch remains. We don’t want to stress this last remnant in any way, even with a quick visit, so we headed down instead across the Iowa border to Hayden Prairie just a few miles from Lime Springs, Iowa. This 240-acre state preserve is considered one of Iowa’s best prairie remnants, a place where on previous visits we’ve seen abundant blooms of the same prairie shooting star that grows in Minnesota.
As we neared the prairie we saw a scene that’s become familiar to us: burned-over land. Prescribed fire burns away dried grasses and returns nutrients to the soil, but we’re never sure what we’ll see when a site has been recently burned. Would prairie shooting star still bloom after the fire?
The answer was yes. An abundance of plants was growing in places where we’d never noticed them before. Most plants were still in bud, but a few had pale flowers open. So our quest was complete: all two shooting stars in one day. Check.
We did see a violet, too, one that we’ve seen before–prairie violet. So our count of violets seen is still ten out of twenty. We’ll continue our search for as many violets as we can find, but we’ll come back to Hayden Prairie, too, to see the prairie responding after the fire.
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