@kellypovo – Page 4 – 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.

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.

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.

Tag: @kellypovo

Signs of Hope

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Buds and Blossoms

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Ladies’-Tresses Perplexes

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