#minnesota – Flower Chasers

Lost and Found

August 14, 2026

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

It’s been years since we’ve been to the Lost Forty Scientific and Natural Area (SNA), a parcel of old growth forest that was saved from clearcutting by a surveying mistake that mapped its trees as part of a lake. No one knows exactly how the forest was lost. My favorite theory (it was November in Minnesota and snowing) is that the surveyors said, “Let’s call it a lake and go home. No one will ever know.” However it happened, no one did realize that these were old growth trees, some of them four hundred years or more old, until the forest was “found” again by an observant ranger in the 1950s.

By mid-August in the flower-chasing season most forest wildflowers have long finished blooming, so we decided to leave our gear behind and just enjoy an unencumbered hike through the Lost Forty tall pines. We hoped to check on an orchid we’d seen there years before, one with two large roundish basal leaves and a flower stalk in bud. Maybe this time there would be enough flower to identify the orchid.

Only two of Minnesota’s orchids have two large round basal leaves–large round-leaved orchid (Platanthera orbiculata) and Hooker’s orchid (Platanthera hookeri). Both grow in pine forests, often in wet places. Although large round-leaved orchid can grow taller than Hooker’s, the heights of the two orchids overlap. And while Hooker’s orchid blooms in June and July, and large round-leaved orchid blooms in July and August, there’s a good month when they might both be blooming. The telltale difference, at least for non-botanist folks like us, is the flower. Round-leaved orchid flowers have a straight lower petal, while the lower petal of Hooker’s orchid curves up in a hook. Large round-leaved or Hooker’s–without a flower we couldn’t tell for sure.

As we hiked the trail, we passed an old-growth pine that Kelly had photographed years ago with me wrapping my arms as far around the trunk as I could–which wasn’t very far. The tree is still there, (and we are still here), so Kelly snapped another picture with her cell phone.

We followed the trail to where it ended at Moose Brook with no sign of orchid leaves, stalk, or flowers. Maybe the orchid was taking a year off underground, which orchids sometimes do. Maybe someone had accidentally stepped on the orchid, which had been growing on the edge of the trail. Maybe it hadn’t been the only orchid of its kind, and we would find another one somewhere nearby.

And as we walked back up the trail what did we find but two Hooker’s orchids growing among bearberries, both with flowers well past prime but still with the telltale hook in the lower petal. Hearty, happy, Hookerish hoots and hollers hurriedly happened.

“Can you believe we saw Hooker’s?” we kept repeating as we drove to another site we had visited six weeks earlier and where I had lost a boot. How does a person lose one boot, you might ask. Best guess: I was scrambling to get out of wet clothes at the side of the road after a downpour and knocked the boot out of the car without noticing it was missing until I got home.

The place I thought I had lost the boot was a few miles farther down the road from another site we love to visit. Why not stop there first on the chance we might see some orchids, then go boot hunting? But at the turnoff to the site (a completely overgrown dirt track) what did we see when we pulled off the road?

My boot, sitting upright in the middle of the turnoff as though it was watching for us or maybe hoping to thumb a ride. The boot seemed in fine condition–nothing chewed on, no unwanted tenants. “Can you believe it?” we asked ourselves again and again. “A Hooker’s orchid AND my boot.” Photographic documentation ensued.

The next day before heading home we spent some hours looking for a bog adder’s mouth orchid we’d seen once but hadn’t ever been able to locate again. At the coordinates where we’d once found the orchid was a fallen tree. Obviously, we decided, we couldn’t find the orchid because a tree had fallen on it. Which is our default whenever we can’t find something where we think it should be. It’s amazing how many flowers have trees fallen on them.

When we go flower chasing we are never sure what we might find (or lose or even lose and find again). But what’s against time spent hiking under tall trees or searching through a mossy forested wetland? We might find a Hooker’s orchid. We might find a lost boot.

We might even find both.

Postscript: We still hope to someday find the orchid we once saw in leaf and bud at the Lost Forty. Neither Hooker’s nor large round-leaved orchid is listed as growing at the Lost Forty, so those leaves and stalk could have been either one. Maybe someday we’ll find out. Maybe not. It’s nice to think that there might still be a mystery orchid lurking somewhere under tall pines.

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.