Friday Fabulous Flower - Trout lily

The spring, woodland ephemerals are a special pleasure this time of year.  The Phactors share a largish patch of these white trout lilies with the neighbors to the east. Lots of plants have no respect for fences or property boundaries. The only thing transgressing from the neighbors to the west is garlic mustard. TPP grew up with the yellow trout lily, but locally Erythronium albidum is the prevalent species.  It's smaller, has more bluish tints to the leaf, and of course a white flower.  But altogether charming especially when you get down to their level. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - Bloodroot

Our persistently warm March weather has really pushed along the flowering.  Here's a wonderful spring ephemeral, bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis, featured this week in our gardens.  It's a small, easy to grow, woodland wild flower in the poppy family, and like many members of the family, it has laticifers and oozes latex when injured, red-orange latex in this case thus both the common name and the generic name referencing blood.  In the days of "likes cure likes" medicinal botany, such likes were avidly sought and thought to be clues to the plant's usefulness. The plant multiplies vegetatively forming such patches in just a couple of years, and here and there seedlings will also appear.  But even a smallish woodland garden has room for lots of these. Each flower has a leaf  wrapped around its flower stalk, a leaf whose rounded apex has characteristic apical sinuses, although they can hardly be seen at flowering stage. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - Liverleaf

Liverleaf is one of TPP's favorite early spring woodland wildflowers.  Interestingly enough the common name liverleaf, and it's genus, Hepatica, derive from the similarity between the plant's three-lobed leaf (H. acutifolia), which is a dark reddish-purple color in the early spring having persisted from the previous season, and a liver. One of such leaf appears just below the flowering stalks at the lower left.  Such associations were actively sought based on a traditional medicine belief system of "likes cure likes".  They don't, but the names have persisted as a relict of that era. This is a fairly easy, trouble-free wild flower to cultivate if you have the right location. In nature the plant is usually found just at the top shoulder and down a slope, often near the base of trees. In TPP's experience the plant doesn't like being buried in leaf litter. In a garden lacking a slope, they grow best at the base of large trees especially between roots. In a garden lacking large trees and slopes, a rock garden would work in a shady area.  The flower color is generally white to lavender, but sometimes you can find a very pink flowered plant. The flowers pop up quickly in the very early spring and are then followed by new trilobed leaves.

Friday Fabulous Flower - snow Trillium

Oh, this really is a fabulous flower, and it really is Friday. This is Trillium nivale, the snow trillium, the smallest trillium and earliest flowering woodland wild flower in these parts. This species is a new addition to our gardens and trying to find a place where it could be seen and yet not over whelmed was quite a challenge; too bad we don't have one.  A sloping rock garden would be just right. This plant is about 3" tall and about 3" across when the leaves are fully expanded. It flowered on March 21st when other early spring wild flowers have yet to make an appearance; Hepatica buds are just beginning to show, bloodroot hasn't appeared, and the next earliest trillium around here, T. recurvatum, just has the tips of its shoots showing. This is truly a cheerful harbinger of spring, although another plant has that common name. It was nice to find this species available in the trade. (And dang but TPP's new iphone takes decent pictures.)