Tag: #minnesotanativewildflowers

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.

Skunk cabbage
Snow trillium
Kittentails in seed
Pasqueflower buds
Pasqueflower

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.

Bloodroot
False rue anemone
Cutleaf toothwort
Dutchman’s breeches
Trout lily
Mayapple
Spring beauty
Sharp-lobed hepatica
Canadian wild ginger
Beaver work
Beaver dam

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

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