Mid April Flowers

On one of my daily walks I passed a house that had a single white crocus coming up in what was once apparently a flower bed. The wide open flower reminded me of a bloodroot flower (Sanguinaria canadensis) so even though I was sure it was too early, I went to where the bloodroots I know of grow and found a single flower there; the earliest I’ve ever seen one bloom. It grows in a group of maybe 25 plants but there wasn’t a sign of any of the others, just this single blossom. Since that day we’ve had some cold nights with frost, so I’m hoping I’ll get to see the others. This plant gets its common name from the bright red sap in its roots, which Native Americans used to decorate their horses with.

Cheery little bluets (Houstonia caerulea) have suddenly popped up in all the lawns. Another name for this plant is Quaker ladies, but I’ve always thought it should have been quaking ladies because all the flowers move in the slightest breeze. I took this photo on a windy day so I was surprised that it came out. What appear to be four petals is actually a single tubular blossom with four lobes.

All the rain we had last summer must have done the willows some good because they’re blooming like I’ve never seen them bloom this year.

Male (shown here) and female willow flowers grow on separate plants. Though willow trees are wind pollinated these willows rely on insects for pollination so there is plenty for the bees to do this year.

Here are the less showy female willow blossoms. If pollinated each flower will become a small yellow, banana shaped seed pod which when ripe will split open and release fluffy seeds to the wind.

Here is a shot of some willow seed pods that I took in 2012. They’re very easily found in summer, but trying to figure out what species of willow you are looking at is far from easy because they cross pollinate so readily. As Henry David Thoreau said “The more I study willows, the more I am confused.”

The pretty flower buds of white ash (Fraxinus americana) are out of the bud and I hope they didn’t get frost bitten. Sometimes these buds are as black as blackberries and other times they’re colored like these were. The Native American Wabanaki tribe made baskets from ash splints and some tribes believed the wood was poisonous to rattlesnakes and used canes made of ash to chase them away.

Male box elder flowers (Acer negundo) are now well out of the bud and their reddish-brown anthers at the ends of long filaments can now blow in the wind and release their pollen. Quick growing, weak box elders are considered “weed trees” that aren’t good for much, not even for fire wood, and many trees throughout the city have been cut down. I was having trouble this year finding a single female tree but I think I’ve finally found one. Male and female flowers bloom on separate trees and I think the lime green flowers on female trees are the prettiest so I always look for them. They begin to show just as the tree’s leaves unfurl. Native Americans must have thought highly of the box elder because the oldest wooden Native American flute ever found was made from its wood.

I haven’t seen any of the female red maple blossoms (Acer rubrum) becoming seeds yet but it’s bound to happen with all of the millions of flowers blossoming in just this small area.

Male red maples are certainly doing their part. Their anthers loaded with pollen, ready for the wind to do its job.

I wanted to see if the sedges were blooming yet so I went to see the plantain leaved sedge (Carex plantaginea,) which is one of the earliest to bloom. I was happy to see that it was full of flowers. I like its crepe paper like leaves, too. They are large for gathering light, so it does well in the shade under trees. The prominent midrib, two lateral veins, maroon bases, and puckered look of the leaves are all used as identifying features for plantain leaved sedge.

The buttery male sedge flowers are the easiest to see, situated as they are at the top of the four-inch stalk, which is called a culm. You can just see the wispy white flowers there behind it. They always appear lower down than the male flowers.

The female flowers are delicate looking, white sticky threads, just waiting the for wind to bring them pollen. They are sublime in their simplicity and they’re one of my favorite things to see in spring.

The deeply pleated, extremely toxic leaves of false hellebore (Veratrum viride) have appeared. They come along between the spring beauties and trout lilies, so are right on time. I was slightly dismayed the other night when a local television show did a piece about a local forager. As the announcer spoke about the forager collecting ramps, the camera showed false hellebore. That was a serious mistake I thought, because eating false hellebore can be deadly.

This photo that I took years ago shows that true ramps, which are a wild onion or leek, bear no resemblance to false hellebore. If you forage for wild plants you would be wise to know them both. The bulbs and leaves of ramps are very strongly flavored with a pungent odor, so a simple sniff would help tell the difference. In some places they are called “The king of stink.” Their usage has been recorded throughout history starting with the ancient Egyptians. They were an important food for Native Americans and later for white settlers as well.

Ohio buckeye (Aesculus glabra) isn’t native to this region as far as I know, but there is one at the local college and I just happened to see its buds breaking. Bud break is defined as “when the green tip of a leaf can be seen emerging from the bud,” but there is often far more to it than that. It’s usually a beautiful thing to witness, and is one of my favorite things about spring. Spring flowers are beautiful, but there is so much more to spring than just the flowers.

Purple trilliums (Trillium erectum) are up and each plant has a single bud that should open in the near future, though I’ve waited a week or more for it to happen in past years. They usually bloom in mid to late April and are one of our largest and most beautiful native wildflowers. This cluster of plants was growing on a boulder.

Even on a gloomy day Forsythia was bright and cheery. Although they’ve become kind of a ho-hum shrub spring would be very different without them in this area. They bloom on any street you care to travel. Some are in hedge form, some are neatly trimmed and others are left natural, as this one was. If you have an embankment that you’re sick of mowing or otherwise dealing with, just plant Forsythia on it. One of the most beautiful spring sights I’ve ever seen was a roadside embankment covered with Forsythias. They were allowed to grow as natural as they wanted, and it was like seeing a yellow waterfall.

Hellebores have come out, just after Easter rather than during Lent. This isn’t my favorite hellebore but since I don’t have any of my own beggars can’t be choosers. This one grows in a local park. I do hope to one day grow some here but there is work to be done first.

There are many varieties of daffodil and I don’t know their name, but these two were tiny; each flower couldn’t have been much over an inch across. I’ve seen the small yellow Tête-à-Tête daffodils and these were probably close to their size but bi-colored.

I know they’re called glory of the snow (Chionodoxa) but our snow is usually long gone before these flowers appear, so I’m not sure where their true glory lies. It doesn’t matter though, because they’re beautiful and I enjoy seeing them each year.

Chionodoxa come in many different colors and are in the asparagus family (Asparagaceae,) along with hyacinths, grape hyacinths, scilla and many other plants.

I stood on the shore of a sea of scilla and watched as the wind made waves, and it was beautiful.

Just after I took this shot of lilac buds a front moved in and the temperature dropped severely before the wind blew and hail fell. Normally I would say something like here is a taste of what’s to come, but now I’m not so sure. I hope they and all of the other flowers made it through the cold and I hope to be able to show them to you in the near future.

In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty. ~Christopher Morley

Thanks for coming by.

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More Mid April Flowers

We’re still getting light conversational snowfalls now and again but that’s common for April in these parts and most flowers and people just shrug it off. Here in New England spring snows are often called “Poor man’s fertilizer” because quite often the lawns have started greening up when they fall. Nitrates from the atmosphere attach to snowflakes and fall to earth and then are released into the soil as the snow melts, so spring snows do indeed fertilize the lands they fall on.

I don’t suppose, as a lover of spring, that I should complain about the cool weather because it is making the season go on and on, as this willow catkin shows. I think I saw the first one about a month ago.

Though it has been cool and damp more new flowers like the little bluets (Houstonia caerulea) seen here are appearing all the time. These tiny, lawn loving 3/8 inch diameter flowers make up for size with numbers and huge drifts of them several yards in width and length are common.  Though they bloom in early spring and are called a spring ephemeral I’ve seen them bloom all summer long where they weren’t mowed. This photo shows the variety of color that can be had with bluets, from dark blue to almost white.

Actually pale blue is more accurate but some are darker than others. I love seeing these cheery little flowers in spring and I always look for the bluest one. The native American Cherokee tribe used an infusion of bluet roots to cure bedwetting.

Hazelnuts have been blossoming since February and I’ve shown them here a few times, but this one might fool you because it shows the female blossoms of the beaked hazelnut (Corylus cornuta.) Though the tiny stigmas look like the female flowers of American Hazelnut (Corylus americana) that I’ve shown previously beaked hazelnuts grow in areas north and east of Keene and I’ve never seen one here. Beaked hazelnuts get their name from the case that surrounds the nut. It is long and tubular and looks like a bird’s beak, while the nut cases of American Hazelnut have two parts that come together like a clam shell. The best way to tell the two apart is by looking at the new growth. On American hazelnut the new twigs will be very hairy and on beaked hazelnut they’ll be smooth.

Purple flowered PJM rhododendrons usually bloom at about the same time as forsythia but they’re a little late this year. The PJM in the name is for Peter J. Mezitt who developed the plant and also founded Weston Nurseries in Weston, Massachusetts. They are also called little leaf rhododendron and take shearing fairly well. They are well liked here and have become almost as common as forsythia.

At first I thought I was seeing more ground ivy but when I looked closer I could see that these tiny blossoms belonged to purple dead nettle (Lamium purpureum.) This plant is originally from Europe and Asia but has made itself right at home here. The leaves on the upper part of the stem usually have a purplish cast and the small purple flowers grow in a cluster around them.

Dead nettle has pretty, orchid like flowers but they’re so small that I can barely see them without a macro lens.

The dead nettle plants grow by the hundreds under some box elder trees that I go to see each year at this time. The lime green, sticky pistils of female box elder flowers (Acer negundo) appear along with the tree’s leaves, but they come a few days to a week after the male flowers have fully opened. Box elders have male flowers on one tree and female flowers on another, unlike red maples which can have both on one tree. This shot is of the female flowers as they had just appeared. They’re a very pretty color.

Mayapples (Podophyllum peltatum) have just come up. This plant is also called American mandrake, which is legendary among herbalists for the root that supposedly resembles a man. Native Americans boiled the root and used the water to cure stomach aches but this plant is toxic and should never be eaten. Two anti-cancer treatment drugs, etoposide and teniposide, are made from the Mayapple plant. They bloom here in mid to late May.

This isn’t my favorite color in a hellebore blossom but there’s a lot going on in there. Pliny said that if an eagle saw you digging up a hellebore it (the eagle) would cause your death. He also said that you should draw a circle around the plant, face east and offer a prayer before digging it up. Apparently doing so would appease the eagle. I’ve never seen an eagle near one but I haven’t dug one up either. I’ve seen these plants bloom in mid-March but not this year.

Fly honeysuckle (Lonicera canadensis) is one of our earliest blooming shrubs and one that not many people see unless they walk in early spring. This example that I saw recently had just these two blossoms open, and they were open even though it was snowing. Its unusual flowers are joined in pairs and if pollinated they become small, red orange, oval, pointed end berries that are also joined in pairs.

Fly honeysuckle flowers form on branch ends of small shrubs and many songbirds love the berries, so it would be a great addition to a wildlife garden. Look for the flowers at the middle to end of April on the shaded edges of woods.

Johnny jump ups (Viola tricolor) are loving this cool damp weather and are blooming better than I’ve ever seen. Long used medicinally in Europe, here it is a welcomed alien. Odd that I haven’t seen any of its cousins the violets blooming yet though.

I’ve tried several times to catch these bloodroot blossoms (Sanguinaria canadensis) open but they don’t like cool cloudy weather and they only stay open until about 3 in the afternoon. On this cold snowy day they had wrapped all their leaves around themselves and never did open, so I’ll have to keep trying.

Many years ago I dug up a bloodroot so I could see the roots but I didn’t take a photo of them so I found this photo of the cut roots taken by someone named “Slayerwulfe” on Wikipedia. It clearly shows how the plant comes by its common name. Native bloodroot is in the poppy family and is toxic, but Native Americans used the plant medicinally and also used the red sap in its roots to decorate their horses.

I know I’ve shown these maple samaras too many times but I’m fascinated by them because I’m not sure if they are silver or red maple seeds. I do know that they are growing very slowly this year. They usually only display these white hairs for just two or three days but this year I’ve seen them for over a week now.

The brown sporangiophores of common horsetails have now come up by the hundreds. These particular examples grow in the gravel near a swamp. It took them about a week to reach this stage from the time they had just broken ground.

This horsetail was fully opened so we can see how the wind could get in there under the sporangiophores and blow the spores around. The whitish “ruffles” at the base of each brown sporangiophore are the spore producing sporangia. Once the horsetail has released its spores it will soon die and be replaced by the gritty green infertile stems that most of us are probably familiar with. Horsetails were used as medicine by the ancient Romans and Greeks to treat a variety of ailments.

The bud scales of lilacs have just opened to show the grape like clusters of flower buds within. I’ve watched lilac buds do this for just about my entire life, but It still gets me excited.

Bottlebrush buckeye (Aesculus parviflora) showed a perfect example of what bud break means. This small tree has flowers that look almost identical to the brushes that I used to clean baby bottles with. That’s a job I don’t miss, come to think of it.

Aspirin size spring beauties (Claytonia carolinana) are carpeting the forest floor now but they won’t be with us long. Once the trees leaf out our spring ephemerals disappear quickly, so I hope you aren’t tired of seeing them.

Each spring beauty flower consists of 5 white, pink striped petals, 2 green sepals, 5 pink tipped stamens, and a single tripartite pistil, which means that it splits into 3 parts. I always look for the deepest colored one and on this day this was the one. I’ve read that these flowers are an important early spring source of nectar for pollinating insects, mostly small native bees and some flies and I’ve noticed lots of insects flying around them this year. I’d guess they’ll be gone in a week.

If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly our whole life would change. ~Buddha

Thanks for coming by. I hope everyone is well and is staying safe. 

 

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