early flowering -Snow Trillium

 It's the first week of March and a few things do flower this early, but not very many native plants.  One of the cutest is the snow Trillium, T. nivale.  Flowering early is  quite usual, and so it pokes up through the leaf litter.  This is also the smallest Trillium at about 3 inches tall and each whorl about as wide. it is easy to overlook, which TTP did for years until an early scouting trip surprised this botanist.  Now it grows in our native plant gardens so its easy to watch for.  This is one plant with 3 aerial shoots, a whorl of three leaves and a flower on each, and it took several years to get this big.  OK this should have been a Friday Fabulous Flower, but I'm a couple of days early.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Earliest wild flower

 

This little beauty is often missed because it blooms so early, March 16 this year.  This is Trillium nivale, often called the snow trillium.  The small scale was added to show how big this flower is.  Tucked in among leaf litter it must stand some 7-8 cm tall and the flowers are some 5-6 cm side.  Each flower sits a top a whorl of three oval leaves.  This is one of earliest native wood land wildffowers of this area.  TPP found this species in a woodland park much to everyone's surprise.

Friday Fabulous Flower

Things are just a bit crazy right now, so seeing an old friend emerge from winter dormancy is rather comforting.  This week is the University's official spring break, and having got most of the students off campus, the powers that be decided to keep them away by extending spring break a week, during which time everyone is supposed to somehow switch to online education.  The advocates of this are certainly not familiar with either hands-on labs or field type courses.  Oh, "if we want students to see something, we show them a picture".  The failure to know the difference between "see" and "observe" has never been more obvious.  There are times it's good to be retired.  
Ah well, back to old friends, out in the woodland portion of our gardens the first real wildflower to appear is the snow Trillium (Trillium nivale), the smallest trillium perhaps in North America.  The flower at about 1 inch in diameter is huge in comparison to the tiny whorl of three leaves.  It would be easy to miss this plant if you were just walking around, but TPP knows where it was planted.  March flowering (the 8th) is nothing new to this plant, having flowered earlier 4 times since it was planted in the fall of 2011. Once it even flowered in late February.  It doesn't like being buried under a thick layer of leaves since it is a pretty small shoot.  In the wild this species tends to grow on slopes.  

Pure delight gardening

TPP is a plant collector in the sense that he takes great delight in observing plants growing and generally doing their thing.  During the course of several decades, he's observed a number of things some of which he has yet to make sense of and turns out that even well known plants can divulge some secrets if you are observant enough and clever or willing to follow up with some diligent study to figure out what you have seen. So a number of plants grow in our gardens for no other reason than TPP likes to see them grow, and growing plants is a way to stay grounded, mentally stable.
Here's a plant that amuses, but makes no sense to most people.  It's small, it's early, it isn't really even very showy becaue of its size unless you're right on top of it, but TPP takes great delight in knowing this plant is in our garden even if it doesn't play the ornamental or useful role of most other garden plants. Unless you know where to look, you'd never see this plant even when in flower unless you know where it is tucked away.  But it was quite comforting and satisfying to find this little beauty doing well even when our country is politically going to hell in a handbasket. This is how gardening helps keep you sane, and at times, TPP begins to suspect that gardeners are the only real sane people around.
Oh, yes, sorry this is a snow trillium (Trillium nivale), the smallest native trillium in North America. It's about 3" across and barely pushes up above the leaf litter. The flower opened on March 4th this year. This species is quite uncommon in these parts, but more common than most people know.