@kapovo – Flower Chasers

Pinesap, Pyrola, Perspiration

July 11-12, 2026

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

We’ve been on a search for all seven of Minnesota’s pyrola and so far have seen five of them (possibly six). The seventh, small shinleaf (Pyrola minor) is a species of special concern in Minnesota, which along with its small size and limited range makes it hard to track down.

Luckily we have a friend who delights in finding wildflowers, rare and otherwise, and who is generous in sharing their locations. When we told him we were still on the hunt for small shinleaf, he offered to show us a patch he had found. So we drove up to meet him in Grand Marais, where the breeze off the lake was a welcome coolness (this was pre-wildfire smoke). He warned us, though, that inland was hotter and muggier, and inland is where we were headed.

On our way to see the small shinleaf we stopped at Pincushion Mountain lookout, where our friend had seen pinesap. We’d seen pinesap once before about a mile along the trail to Bear and Bean Lake. Did we write down the coordinates to help us find it again? We did not. Besides, in our memories it was far gone to seed. So a quick walk along a short trail to see pinesap in better condition sounded just right.

But pinesap keeps its own schedule. Because it lacks chlorophyll and doesn’t need sunlight to produce food, it also doesn’t need to show itself above ground every year. Apparently this was one of those years.

Our friend offered to send us coordinates for another location not too far off our route home, and we headed on for the main event, finding small shinleaf.

If our first stop was a short walk down a trail, our hike to see small shinleaf was the opposite—a long bushwhack over uneven terrain through forest with alder thickets, waist-high patches of bracken fern, downed trees, and logs hidden underfoot. Did we mention the uneven hillside? Before long we were drenched in sweat, but we trusted our friend and slogged on after him, resisting the urge to ask, “Are we there yet?” (I could hear Kelly, though, behind me thinking it. Loudly.)

Finally he told us, “This looks like the place.”

And sure enough scattered on the forest floor were single upright stems with small white flowers, mostly done blooming but with a few flowers still open. Two other white-flowered shinleaf look similar, but not only are small shinleaf’s flowers arranged differently around the stem but it also has shorter styles (the slender stalk in the middle of the flower) while the flowers of the other two shinleaf are larger and have longer, curved styles like elephant trunks.

Kelly took photos, careful not to let sweat drip on her camera. I wrote down GPS coordinates, and Kelly asked me “Why?” There is a remote chance we would ever want to find this location again, (but not in hot and muggy weather without carrying a week’s worth of food and water and possibly a small battery operated fan). Then we headed back for the road by a shorter route with less bushwhacking and only one little creek to leap. We emerged from the woods soaked with perspiration, glad to see our cars not far down the road.

After many gulps of water and many thanks to our friend, we drove off in air conditioned comfort to check on a ditch we’d seen two years earlier full of lesser purple fringed orchid. Last year when we’d checked on the ditch, we found not a single sign of a single orchid. Were they gone? Taking a year off underground? Just not up yet? This year, because we were looking about a week later into summer, our hopes were high.

So were the orchids, about thirty of them growing out of the ditch, some in bud, some partly blooming. With happy hearts we drove on to spend the night with generous friends at their home on Lake Superior.

Now that we’d seen small shinleaf, we only needed to see round-leaved pyrola to complete the set. We thought we might have seen it last year along Woods Creek trail, although it might have been green-flowered pyrola, which looks similar but has duller leaves than round-leaved pyrola. On Sunday we set out to re-hike Woods Creek trail to check on which pyrola we had seen.

The day was hot and sunny. The creek babbled along below us, and we were grateful for occasional breezes that cooled us off. We saw plenty of pyrola—one-sided, pink, one-flowered— but when we came to the plants we’d been uncertain about, we knew enough now to identify them as dull-leaved green pyrola. So we are still on the hunt for pyrola number seven.

On the way home we detoured from the highway to follow our friend’s coordinates down narrower and narrower winding dirt roads until we came to the place he had sent us. And there, just where our friend had said, we found pinesap— a few stalks going to seed and one plant fighting its way up out of matted leaves, its stalks and flowers still ghostly white.

Epilogue: When we got home Kelly checked the picture she had taken of pinesap on the Bear and Bean Lake trail and realized that that pinesap had been in better and more colorful condition than the pinesap we’d seen along the road. And even though we had seen pinesap before, in a weekend that began and ended with a search for pinesap, with plenty of pyrola in between, it’s good to know that, under trees and down roads in the back of beyond, more pinesap makes at least an occasional appearance. To know, too, that somewhere in forests we may never hike again we have seen small shinleaf, thanks to our wildflower-wise friend.

See more of what we are SEEING NOW…

Back to the Big Bog

July 2026

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

It’s been twenty years this summer since we first set foot on the boardwalk into the Big Bog up by Waskish, Minnesota. I was working on a picture book that became One North Star, a counting book about some of Minnesota’s many habitats, and as I started doing research I learned that Minnesota has bogs. In fact, Minnesota’s peatlands are vast, the most of any state except Alaska. And I knew that to write about the bog I would need to go to the bog.

Kelly and I love taking road trips, so when I told her I was headed up to the Big Bog, she said, “I’ll come, too.” And we went.

The walk out on the mile-long Big Bog boardwalk took us into a landscape I had never experienced before. By the time we reached the end of the boardwalk I was in love with the bog and wanted to write a whole book about it. And Kelly had begun to take wildflower pictures, something new in her photography career. Eventually our mutual love of native wildflowers took us criss-crossing the state and creating a wildflower-chasing blog and two wildflower books.

So what could be better, twenty years later, than to head up to where it all started? When we arrived at Big Bog State Recreation Area at the camper cabin we had rented, we were worn out from the heat of the day and some serious wildflower chasing stops on our drive north. We agreed that we could better appreciate the bog and the boardwalk after a good night’s sleep and some excellent Mexican carry-out we had picked up in Bemidji.

We have always been crack-of-dawn risers, and the next morning we left early (but not before coffee, never before coffee) and drove the few miles north to the Big Bog Boardwalk. Would the magic still be there?

Yes.

As we made our way along the boardwalk, we compared what we remembered with what we were seeing. In our first wildflower book I wrote that it was one of the wildest places I had ever seen. It still is.

The tamarack and black spruce trees were still stunted, although they seemed to reach farther out into the bog along the boardwalk than we remembered. On our first trip, almost all the plants and flowers were new to us. This time we could name them — bog cranberry, wild calla lily, round-leaved sundew, leatherleaf, cottongrass — and we were able to figure out the difference between bog laurel gone to seed and bog rosemary gone to seed, something we had no clue about twenty years earlier. Near the end of the boardwalk purple pitcher plants poked their pinwheel flowers up above the many-colored mosses stretching out under an endless sky.

The biggest difference we noticed was that the bog seemed dryer than we remembered. Was this because of climate change? A dry year? Or simply that memories are chancy?

We have learned, in our wanderings, how places change. Habitats aren’t static. Flowers don’t always stay put, sometimes spreading, sometimes vanishing. Trees encroach when they can.

We have changed, too, although it’s hard to believe that we’ve changed twenty years’ worth. Surely we’re not really twenty years older? But we are, and we’re always grateful we can still be chasing flowers, in bogs or woodlands or prairies or along roadsides–wherever we find them. It’s good to come back after twenty years to a place that feels like the beginnings of our flower-chasing and find that the bog remains mysterious and vast and wild. It fills us with the same stillness, the same magic, the same otherness that we remembered.

I wonder what we’ll find when we come back twenty years from now.

We can’t wait to find out.

Violets Revisited

May 26, 2025

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

The time for violet chasing is short, and we’ve been on the hunt this spring to see all of Minnesota’s eighteen violets while they’re blooming. Which is a correction from our last violet blog, when we wrote that there were twenty different Minnesota violets. A reclassification of Minnesota violets in 2023 took the number down to eighteen members of the genus viola plus green violet which belongs to the genus cubelium instead of viola, is state-endangered, and whose picture looks, to our non-botanist eyes, nothing much like the other violets. And which, despite diligent searching, we have yet to see.

When we wrote the last post we’d managed to see ten viola violets –arrow-leaved, birdfoot, common blue, lance-leaved, marsh, northern white, prairie, smooth yellow, western Canada, and yellow prairie (state-threatened).

We are happy to report that we have now seen the other eight viola violets. Here’s how it happened.

Two weekends ago we headed up to Duluth for a joint event with Zenith Books and The Tasting Room, stopping along the way at Magney-Snively Natural Area where we found Carolina spring beauty (which we’d also been chasing this spring). After book-and-tea time with fellow wildflower enthusiasts we visited nearby Hartley Nature Center where we came across Great Lakes violet and sweet white violet– numbers eleven and twelve. At Stony Point, our next stop, we found violet number thirteen–great spurred violet.

After visits with family and friends we headed back to the cities, still on the hunt for violets.

First stop: Stub Trail at Fall Lake Campground in the Superior National Forest, where dog violet grew along a trail–violet number fourteen. Then off to Sax Zim Bog where we found violet number fifteen, kidney-leaved violet, growing near a bog boardwalk. At Jay Cooke State Park we clambered down along uptilted rocks by the river to find sand violet–number sixteen.

This past weekend we set out to finish the list with the last two violets. In an Anoka sandplain wetland we found an abundance of primrose-leaved violets–violet number seventeen. One to go: northern bog violet. But despite scouring trails in southeastern Minnesota we saw barely any violets at all, although we did see our first blooming orchid of the year, showy orchis.

Thanks to a friend telling us about a site closer to home we did find northern bog violet blooming cheerily along with a few small yellow lady’s-slipper and small white lady’s slipper nearby. Violet number eighteen and blooming orchids two and three. (Can you tell I like to count?)

A violet-filled springtime of chasing down all Minnesota’s viola violets and a chance to see the world awakening to spring. Next year, who knows? We might actually find green violet.

As a bonus, we’ve come up with a slogan for our next protest sign:

Violets, not violence.