#northshore – Flower Chasers

Heading North

July 4-5, 2025

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

Saturday evening we have an event for our new wildflower book at Drury Lane Books in Grand Marais, so we leave on Friday to get in some flower chasing on the drive up. We’re hoping to find all of the pyrolas (except perhaps state-endangered small shinleaf) in one weekend, and with any luck we might also see at least one rare wildflower we’ve been dreaming about.

Our first stop is in Duluth, where we meet up with a naturalist who has generously offered to show us floating marsh marigold, which has been on our want-to-see list for years now. Floating marsh marigold has small leaves, very small white flowers, and blooms June through August in slow-moving water and along muddy shores. (Its close kin marsh marigold has large leaves, bright yellow flowers, and blooms in April and May in streams and lakes and ditches. It’s a little hard to believe they’re related, but they are.)

On our own we might never have seen this tiny floating flower, and we’re grateful to the naturalist for showing it to us and to the flower itself for blooming when we could see it. As we drive farther north, we are floating, too, with the thrill of finally seeing this state-endangered flower.

Next stop: Tettegouche State Park, where we find pink pyrola blooming under a bridge, our first pyrola of the trip. Despite diligent searching, though, we don’t locate the one-sided pyrola that is supposed to be growing nearby.

At Temperance River State Park we connect with a fellow flower chaser to drive down roads ever more narrow, rocky, and muddy to a stream between lakes and surrounded by pines, a place that feels a little forgotten and more than a little magical. It’s also a place where state-endangered small white water-lily has been seen somewhere inside an area of 27 kilometers, according to INaturalist.

“The leaves look like Pac-man,” our friend tells us as we don muck boots for our search. And when, eventually, we spot first one single leaf, then another and another, they really do look like Pac-man, round with a deep vee. Hoping for flowers as well as leaves we wander along a nearby lake and spot one, then, two, then three plants with bright white buds almost open and more Pac-man-like leaves.

Without a nearby American white water-lily for comparison, it’s hard for a photo to show how small the flowers and leaves that we’re seeing really are. American white water-lily has flowers 3 to 6 inches and leaves 4 to 12 inches, while small white water-lily has flowers 1 1/2 to 3 inches with leaves 1 1/2 to 6 inches. These small flowers open for only a few hours each day, so either we’ve come at the wrong time of day or else the buds aren’t quite ready to flower. Several years ago we bought hip waders for just such an occasion, and we gleefully don them for their inaugural wade deeper into the lake and a little nearer these rare and diminutive plants.

Two state-endangered flowers in one day–giddy with delight we head to our rented cabin on Lake Superior for the night.

And wake to a dripping sky and an all-day forecast of rain.

But we are flower-chasers, undaunted by a little water falling on us. We’ve never yet been deterred by rain, and we don’t intend to start now.

Fog socks in the lake and blurs the road as we set out, but when we turn inland both fog and rain gradually lighten. At a gravel pit that we love to visit, we find the green-flowered pyrola that a friend has told us about and that has been on our to-see list for years. Our second pyrola of the trip, and that’s just the beginning.

Across the road we find a yellow-colored coralroot that we’ve seen here once before and puzzled over (too tall for early coralroot, way too far out of it’s range and bloom time for autumn coralroot). Now we know that it’s a yellow spotless variant of western spotted coralroot. Close by, early coralroot has gone to seed, and western spotted coralroot blooms in its usual colors. Along a nearby trail we also find ragged fringed orchid in bud, huronensis orchid in flower, and many small green wood orchids (also known as club-spur orchid) in bud.

Six orchids before nine o’clock on a rainy day when we set out to see pyrolas. You never know what might happen when you go flower chasing.

Our search for pyrola resumes when a friend sends us coordinates for a section of the Superior Hiking Trail, where he’s seen several pyrola. The overcast sky and dripping trees make this place, too, feel magical, as though we’ve somehow been transported to a bit of the west coast rain forest. A creek burbles beside us on its way downhill as we follow the trail up. And up. And up.

Along the way we find more clumps of the yellow spotless variant of western spotted coralroot bright under the pines, lots of western spotted coralroot, and a single spotted coralroot barely out of the ground. We love finding these orchids, but we’re still on the lookout for pyrola, and we find them, too: one-flowered pyrola, one-sided pyrola, shinleaf (elliptical pyrola), and green-flowered pyrola along with their near-relation, pipsissewa.

Weekend pyrola total: all the pyrolas except round-leaved pyrola and small shinleaf, which is a plant of state special concern and will most likely take a lot more looking to locate.

One last stop of the day at Icelandite Fen Scientific and Natural Area reveals a few tiny auricled twayblade, bringing the weekend orchid total to eight.

The evening event at Drury Lane Books is filled with friendly folks interested in wildflowers and in restoring the land. We end our Fourth of July weekend full of gratitude for new friends, new places, and wildflowers both new and familiar.

With so many riches, who needs fireworks?

See more of what we are SEEING NOW..

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.

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.