Tag: #lakesuperior

Keweenaw Adventure Day Four

June 25, 2025

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

The second day of our plant class on the Keweenaw begins with a hike down through boreal forest past familiar inhabitants–bunchberry, twinflower, starflower, Canada mayflower–along with a new-to-us flower, barren strawberry, a plant of special concern in Minnesota.  Here its distinctive leaves and yellow flowers spread across the forest floor with nary a berry in sight.  The trail ends at a wide rock beach cradled by rock ridges that form Horseshoe Harbor.

On one side of the beach common butterwort, an arctic disjunct, covers a rock wall.  Arctic disjuncts are plants separated by hundreds of miles from their habitat farther north. Butterwort is rare in Minnesota and Michigan, but here the rocks are dotted with the plant’s pristine purple flowers and sticky, star-shaped yellow leaves that trap and devour small insects. Another arctic disjunct, bird’s-eye primrose, grows nearby, its small pink flowers almost done except for two that we find in cheery bloom.  Dwarf raspberry bushes have found rootholds in the rock and are developing berries, and three-toothed cinquefoil with its bright white flowers is scattered along rock cracks and fractures. This is a place that makes our flower-chasing hearts beat with joy. What’s not to love about a Lake Superior beach, and this one is, well, superior.

Over lunch we learn about the geology of this area, how Isle Royale and the Keweenaw peninsula were once connected and share the same geology.  We learn, too, how veins of calcium in the rocks around us help create a habitat for calcium-loving plants, which are often arctic disjuncts. 

On the other side of the beach we climb onto a high rock ridge with a vast view of Lake Superior and wander past microhabitats of three-toothed cinquefoil,  sedges, creeping juniper, and the occasional frog. 

Safely down from the ridge, we learn more about how the layers of rock tell a geologic tale of sediment and stromatolites, which are earth’s oldest fossils. Rocks have stories, if we only know how to read them.

Today’s after-class flower chasing takes us, thanks to some shared coordinates, to a place where at least twenty-five ram’s-head lady’s-slippers grow. Most of the flowers are past their prime, but it’s still a thrill to see these delicate orchids in a new location. 

We end the day with a hike near Copper Harbor where three years earlier I came across giant rattlesnake plantain for the first time.  We don’t find the plants I saw then,  but we do find an abundance  of pink shinleaf almost ready to bloom and another population of giant rattlesnake plantain leaves nestled in the moss.

A spectacular day, and one that brings our trip total of orchids seen so far to thirteen. 

What will tomorrow bring?  We can hardly wait to find out.

Barren strawberry
Butterwort
Bird’s-eye primrose
Dwarf raspberry
Three-toothed cinquefoil
Creeping juniper
Ram’s-head Lady’s-slipper
Pink pyrola
Giant rattlesnake plantain

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!

Surprises

June 17, 2023

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

Because we are in the midst of another book, our wildflower chasing trips this summer have been focused mostly on specific flowers we want to include in the new book. This means heading out to particular places at times we are able to go and hoping the plants we want to see will cooperate by blooming where we can find them. Alas, not always true, but even when we don’t have total flower chasing success, we sometimes find unlooked-for surprises.  

This past weekend we headed north with a laundry list of places to stop and plants we need to see, but as we made our way up the north shore we checked off stop after stop without checking off any flowers that we needed. 

Then we came to a section of Lake Superior shoreline where we’d been told we might see arctic relicts.  We made our way down the rocks, careful of where they dropped off steeply and of the slippery places where, even in this dry year, water seeped toward the lake. In one damp spot, a splendid surprise:  Canadian tiger swallowtail butterflies puddling on the rock, flitting down to the moisture, sipping, flying away to return for another drink. 

Butterflies weren’t the only surprise.  In cracks of the rocks and in places where the water pooled we found common butterwort (so much that we understood how it got its name, since we’ve only ever seen it uncommonly in Minnesota before), bird’s-eye primrose with some flowers still blooming, three-toothed cinquefoil flowering, and round-leaved sundew gleaming redly in the moss.  We wandered from tiny habitat to tiny habitat, marveling that high on these rocks a small relict world survived.

Then back to the road and more stops.  By the end of the day we had checked off a few finds:  western spotted coralroot, small false asphodel, Canada buffaloberry.  We’d found several places we hoped to return to again when flowers might be more cooperative. We’d found a sweet little habitat of plants thriving in their own world. And we had spent the day in the presence of Lake Superior.  

We counted the day a success.

Bird’s-eye primrose
Common butterwort
Three-toothed cinquefoil
Columbine
Tufted bulrush
Canadian tiger swallowtail

See MORE of what we are seeing now!