#wildflowerwomen – 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..

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.

Counting (Shooting) Stars

May 10, 2025

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

In our continuing search for all of Minnesota’s twenty violets, we set out last weekend to try to find state-endangered eastern green violet, one of the rarest flowers in the state, known in only a few places.

We scaled steep ravines, slipped and slid down dry rocky creek beds, wandered alongside (and got our hiking boots wet in) still-running creeks.
Did we find eastern green violet?

We did not. But we saw plenty of common blue violet along with cutleaf toothwort, eastern false rue anemone, Jack-in-the-pulpit, trout lily, Canadian wild ginger, mayapple in bud, Virginia spring beauty, drooping trillium, wild geranium, wild blue phlox, and marsh marigolds in brilliant yellow bloom.

We were close enough to Maglessen Bluff Park for a quick trip to see if the jeweled shooting stars, in bud last weekend, were blooming now. They were, their bright magenta petals folding back, so we decided on a different quest. We would try to see all of Minnesota’s shooting stars in a day instead.

All two of them.

Jeweled shooting star blooms April to May on limestone cliffs in hardwood forests and occasionally in goat prairies. Flowers are almost always a rosy purple-to-pink, very rarely white.

Prairie shooting star blooms April to June in open prairies and savannas with flowers that look very much like jeweled shooting star except that they are almost always pale or white. In Minnesota, though, habitat for prairie shooting star has been reduced so much that only a single known population in a roadside ditch remains. We don’t want to stress this last remnant in any way, even with a quick visit, so we headed down instead across the Iowa border to Hayden Prairie just a few miles from Lime Springs, Iowa. This 240-acre state preserve is considered one of Iowa’s best prairie remnants, a place where on previous visits we’ve seen abundant blooms of the same prairie shooting star that grows in Minnesota.

As we neared the prairie we saw a scene that’s become familiar to us: burned-over land. Prescribed fire burns away dried grasses and returns nutrients to the soil, but we’re never sure what we’ll see when a site has been recently burned. Would prairie shooting star still bloom after the fire?

The answer was yes. An abundance of plants was growing in places where we’d never noticed them before. Most plants were still in bud, but a few had pale flowers open. So our quest was complete: all two shooting stars in one day. Check.

We did see a violet, too, one that we’ve seen before–prairie violet. So our count of violets seen is still ten out of twenty. We’ll continue our search for as many violets as we can find, but we’ll come back to Hayden Prairie, too, to see the prairie responding after the fire.