As usual, the floral season here begins with Trillium nivale, the snow trillium.  This year I caught a pollinator in the act.   I'm not sure what the insect is, but I think it's a small native carpenter bee(?).  Recently emerged bumblebee queens, if any are about, are too busy looking for a nesting site to be interested in these very early trilliums.  Photo date: April 7, 2020.

Pasqueflower, Pulsatilla patens, or its synonym Anemone patens, sometimes called "prairie crocus," is one of the first spring flowers to bloom in Minnesota prairies.  My property has no natural prairie, and the only prairie-like habitat here is the mound of our septic system, which must be kept free of brush and other woody vegetation.  I grew these septic mound plants from seed I received from a friend in Martin County, Minnesota, where the species is native, but seed is also available online.  Photo taken May 1.   Pasqueflower has turned out to be a high maintenance species.  While the plant is quite drought tolerant, it can't compete with taller vegetation.  I've found I have to pull even high value species like brown-eyed Susans and wild bergamot when they encroach on pasqueflower.

The oldest patch of bloodroot in my yard as it was at the beginning of May. This colony was started about 20 years ago as a single plant.  Over the years this patch has provided many seeds and plants for establishing new patches elsewhere in the yard and woods.

Non-native alert!  You won't find these in the woodlands of Minnesota or the eastern U.S.  I have long admired the stunning blue color of some of the cultivars of Chinese Corydalis widely available from U.S. nurseries but impossible to grow in northern U.S. states.  Fortunately there are Siberian species with just as great color that are hardy in Minnesota.  I was able to purchase plants of three such Siberian species from a German nursery with the help of my late German friend Gerhard.  The plants shown here are Corydalis fumariifolia ssp. azurea.  All three of these species are true spring ephemerals and are gone within a couple weeks of blooming.

By May 5 there's a lot more action.  Claytonia virginica (left) is blooming, and Cypripedium pubescens, one of the earliest spring orchids here, is starting to poke up.  The plant at right is my largest C. pubescens clump.  After the plant reached 50 flowers, I stopped counting them.

By mid-May most spring ephemerals are blooming including Dutchman's breeches at left and yellow trout lily at right.  Note that bloodroot, in the lower right corner at right, is already finished blooming.

Amethyst shooting star, Primula fassettii (formerly Dodecatheon amethystinum), seedlings the first season after planting out from pots.  For me, the hardest thing about growing shooting stars from seed is that the leaves of the small plants resemble those of several common weeds whose seeds invariably get blown into shooting star flats or pots thus making weeding very difficult.  To appreciate the growth  of the plants in this little patch, check out the subsequent photos in the 2021 and 2022 archives.

Native to Iowa and Wisconsin but not Minnesota, Collinsia verna, spring blue-eyed Mary, is truly a spring ephemeral as it blooms in spring and is  dormant   dead by summer.  The plant is what is known as a winter annual, which means the seed germinates in the fall, stays green all winter, then goes through its reproductive cycle when warm temperatures return.  To me, one of the most endearing features of blue-eyed Mary is that the seedlings appear in fall, often after frost here, just when I'm growing sad because most of my favorite plants are going dormant.  I relish making the rounds of our yard and woods in fall counting the number of newly emerged Collinsia seedlings in some of the newer, smaller patches.  I am amazed at how adept the little seedlings are at twisting and turning their way up through a thick layer of freshly fallen bur oak leaves.  Really large leaves like those of our basswood trees, however, are more of an obstacle.   Blue-eyed Mary is not just a pretty face.  Bumblebees have a field day visiting the densely packed blooms in a large patch of the plants. Notice the pink petals on a few of the flowers.  That is a very rare form.  I am indeed lucky that the genes for this coloration are present in the seed my friend Dan in Virginia sent me from his yard.

This is a close-up of one of the pink flowered Collinsia.

Trillium flexipes, left, should not be confused with Trillium grandiflorum, right.

Clematis occidentalis, purple clematis, is an uncommon native of northern Minnesota.  As vines go, the species is fairly inept as a climber because it lacks the tendrils that enable other climbers such as Virginia creeper to ascend to great heights.  Purple clematis struggles to climb by twining around branches of surrounding vegetation or any other suitable structures the vine can find.  One time in an Itasca County woodland I was pleasantly surprised after I stooped to examine yellow lady's-slipper shoots newly poking up from the forest floor.  Upon restanding, I was hit in the head gently by a dangling flower-laden clematis vine that was swinging around in a gentle breeze.  The vine seldom reaches heights of more than 10 or 12 feet. The vine shown here is one of several that I purchased in pots from Nordic Natives, which propagated the plants from cuttings.  The purple flowers produce heads of seeds with large feathery tails as a mechanism for wind dispersal.  Many of the seed heads remain on the plant all winter and thus provide "winter interest" in the garden.  The individual in the photo is climbing a paper birch tree by way of broken tree branches hanging down from above.  Because the plant is such an ineffective climber, it could not ascend the tree by simply clinging to the bark of the trunk without the aid of these branches.  I learned this the hard way by placing plants at the base of a couple trees without any nearby potential support structures for the clematis.  In fall 2021 I collected some seeds from this plant, cold stratified them over the winter, and obtained excellent, though slow, germination by early summer of 2022.  As of this writing (2023), I have plans to place some of the plants now wintering in my slightly heated barn in suitable locations in my woods. The next photo below shows how the vine in this photo twines around intact tree branches roughly 10 feet above the ground.

Here you see the Clematis occidentalis spreading itself around to gather the stronger light available above the ground vegetation.

Left: Primula meadia, formerly Dodecatheon meadia, prairie shooting star that I purchased from a nursery in Virginia. Right: Galearis spectabilis, showy orchis, purchased from Gardens of the Blue Ridge.

Showy orchis is one of my favorite plants.  It is the first native orchid I ever identified in the wild when I was a kid in northeastern Indiana.  One May morning when I was in sixth grade, I lay in bed reading an article about native orchids in my Junior Natural History magazine.  There were no photos in the article, but the drawings were pretty good.  Later that morning I went hiking with a friend in a nearby woods, and we practically stumbled over a small group of showy orchis.  From the drawing in the magazine, I immediately knew what the plant was.  I carefully picked one of the flowers, admired its fragrance, and carried it around with me in a little vial of water for the next week.  All through school and on into college, I used to return to view that population nearly every spring. Then one year when I was in grad school, I returned to visit the orchids and was shocked to find not only the plants, but the whole woods gone!  It had been bulldozed to make a college golf course.  That was the start of my intense interest in conservation in general and especially in orchid conservation.  I've not had much use for the game of golf ever since.

Alas, my success with lab propagation of Cypripedium orchids has not extended to the showy orchis.  I have spent well over a decade in the lab trying every trick I can think of that works for propagating Cyps and also many other ideas and propagation media and have had no more than half a dozen seeds germinate in the course of these efforts.  No doubt those few seeds that did germinate did so because of some rare mutation.  None of those resulting protocorms grew into healthy looking seedlings, and all eventually perished after an extended period of very slow growth. Currently the only way to propagate showy orchis successfully is by division.  Several years ago Gardens of the Blue Ridge, in their Fall Newsletter 2012, published a paragraph and diagram demonstrating their method for dividing the plant.  For years I've thought about trying this with one of my bigger clumps, but I've always chickened out.  Instead I've been content to let the small plants, either purchased or given to me by friends, grow into big clumps like this in the hope that the resulting prolific seed production will result in volunteer seedlings appearing nearby.  So far, however, no such volunteers have shown up.

Overview of a part of my bur oak grove with showy orchis:

Our Minnesota native northern bluebells, Mertensia paniculata, bloom later than Virginia bluebells and remain in bloom until mid-June.  An advantage our bluebells have over the latter species is that the luxuriant foliage of northern bluebells remains for nearly the whole summer.

In mid-June wild calla, Calla palustris, is blooming in the artificial pond by the barn.  Here the plant is accompanied by arrowhead and duckweed.  This pond is so shallow that it freezes solid most winters and thus is not a good place for frogs and turtles to winter.  Nevertheless turtles often find their way to the pond in early summer and spend quite a bit of time sunning themselves on a fallen log.  One year we even had a muskrat spend his summer here, but he got eaten by an itinerant mink in early fall.  I didn't witness the actual event but did see the mink cleaning up at the edge of the pond after his meal before being on his way.

By mid-June Cypripedium reginae begins to bloom.  The color of the flowers varies considerably among plants;  blooms of plants receiving a lot of sun are generally much paler than those of plants that have more shade.  Even among plants in the same light conditions, however, there is variation in color, probably of genetic origin.  At left, the plant in front has the deepest pink lip of all my showy lady's-slippers.

In early July grass pink orchids, Calopogon tuberosus, begin to bloom at the edge our bog.  About two miles south of us there is a lakeside fen where the grass pinks bloom a week or two earlier that here because those plants get full sun all day long.  The grass pinks in our bog are on the west side of a dense stand of tamarack and black spruce trees, and thus our grass pinks get little sun before noon. Notice the abundance of Indian pipe, Monotropa uniflora, poking up through the sphagnum moss in the background.

At left is a closer view of the Indian pipe as it pokes up through the sphagnum.  The moss is looking pretty dry. More grass pinks at right with purple pitcher plants, Sarracenia purpurea, at their base and in the background.

Pitcher plants are not the only carnivorous plants in our bog.  At left is a roundleaf sundew, Drosera rotundifolia, nearly hidden by sedge leaves.  Indeed sedges and other vegetation often choke out the little sundews, so occasionally I spread a bit of sundew seed in more open spots. Meanwhile back in our upland yard, Michigan lilies also bloom in a damp spot mid-July.

By the beginning of September both white turtleheads, Chelone glabra, and rose turtleheads, Chelone obliqua, begin to bloom.  White turtlehead is native to northern Minnesota, and there is a nice natural population in a moist depression on our land.  The Minnesota DNR claims that C. obliqua is native to Minnesota, but I have my doubts.  The species is native to Iowa to our south, but there seem to be no existing wild populations in Minnesota or even any herbarium specimens from Minnesota.  The only possible evidence I can find that C. obliqua is native to Minnesota is that Eloise Butler planted it in her wildflower garden, and she planted Minnesota natives, so perhaps she thought the species was native here.

A closer view of rose turtlehead flowers.  Seeds of this species never ripen here in our short season, whereas those of our native white turtlehead do.

By mid-September signs of fall are everywhere.  Here bottle gentian, Gentiana andrewsii, and white turtleheads are blooming and showy lady's-slipper leaves are yellowing.

For 2019 flower photos click here.

Home