Category Archives: Wildflowers – Spring

Beavertail Cactus

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While hiking through the Arizona and Nevada desert, I often seen this classic arid-land plant. Found in the southwestern United States, it occurs mostly in the Mojave, Anza-Borrego, and Colorado Deserts, as well as in the Colorado Plateau and northwest Mexico.

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Beavertail Cactus looks like the Prickly Pear Cactus, but does not have long spines. This is a medium-to-small species that grows to about a foot tall, with pink-to-rose colored flowers. This plant can be found in chaparral, desert and grassland. It grows in well drained soil composed of sand, gravel, cobble and even on boulders.

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A single plant may consist of hundreds of fleshy, flattened pads. These gray-green, jointed stems are wide and flat resembling the tail of a Beaver. Although they lack spines, they have many small barbed bristles, called glochids, that easily penetrate the skin.

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The Cahuilla Native Americans used this plant as a food staple. Its buds were cooked or steamed, and then were eaten or stored. Its large seeds were ground up to be eaten as mush. The Desert Tortoise enjoys eating the juicy pads and the magenta-colored flowers of this plant.

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Beavertail is usually the first cactus in the Mojave Desert to bloom, flowering as early as February and through May.

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Indian Paintbrush

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While hiking on Mount Charleston in Nevada I came across a number of wildflowers; this one was particularly distinctive.

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Indian Paintbrush is a hemiparasite, meaning that although it is green and can photosynthesize, it also has the ability to sequester nutrients from other organisms, in this case, perennial grasses.

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Despite being parasites for part of their lives, these plants, like other flowering plants, rely on pollinators for reproduction. A variety of insects visit Indian Paintbrush flowers, especially bees. This is somewhat surprising since the color red is difficult for insects to see.

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However, like most red flowers, it is especially adapted for pollination by hummingbirds. Hummingbirds have long bills that allow them to reach the nectar rewards at the end of long, tubular flowers.

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Ironically, this plant was used by Native Americans as both a love charm in food and as a poison used to against their enemies, as this species is known to have toxic properties.

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Indian Paintbrush generally prefers sunlight and moist, well drained soils. Their root systems connect with and grow into the root systems of other planets to harvest nutrients from their host plants. For this reason, they are not able to be transplanted easily.

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That red color we so often admire is actually bracts, or specially modified leaves, as opposed to flowers. The plant’s true flowers are actually smaller, slender green growths hidden among the bracts.

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Leatherleaf

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While visiting a bog on Kent, Ohio, I came across this neat plant. It is a species characteristically found in sphagnum peat bogs. Leatherleaf provides cover for nesting mallards and some other ducks. It recovers quickly in peatlands that have been severely disturbed or mined for peat.

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This plant has a distribution throughout the cool temperate and subarctic regions of the Northern Hemisphere from eastern North America to bogs in Finland and Japan.

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Leatherleaf is often the first woody plant to encroach on the open water of a kettle hole lake. It is a small, dense, mound-shaped shrub, growing to 5 feet high, often spreading to form thickets.

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As its common names implies, Leatherleaf has thick, leathery leaves to minimize water loss from transpiration. To conserve nutrients and maximize photosynthesis, its brownish evergreen leaves persist for nearly two seasons and are gradually shed as new leaves become established.

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It’s urn-shaped white flowers appear in early Spring, often while ice is still present.

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Canadian Wild Ginger

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While hiking in Carmel, Indiana, I can across this bit of greenery on the forest floor. It is a herbaceous, perennial plant which forms dense colonies in the understory of deciduous forests throughout its native range in eastern North America.

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Canadian Wild Ginger is unrelated to commercially available ginger; however, it is named “wild ginger” because of the similar taste and smell of the roots. Early European settlers used to dry the rootstalk, grind it to a powder and use it as a spice.

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The plant’s two velvety, heart-shaped leaves barely reach 12 inches in height. Its flowers bloom from the base of the plant, often hidden by its wide leaves.

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Many a hiker has walked past the large colonies of this early Spring wildflower not realizing that it has an interesting and peculiar flower hidden underneath its canopy of foliage.

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Canadian Wild Ginger evolved to attract small pollinating flies that emerge from the ground early in the Spring, looking for a thawing carcass of an animal that did not survive the winter. By being so close to the forest flower, it is readily found by the emerging flies.

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Not only is this plant cool to see in the wild, it is often grown in gardens as groundcover in shady situations.

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Seaside Bird’s-foot Trefoil

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01 Hosackia gracilis_1492

While visiting Point Reyes National Seashore, I noticed this cool flower. It is found in moist open habitats, from the edges of forests out into open meadows and wetlands. It occurs from coastal mountains to the bluffs overlooking the sea.

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Native to coastal California, this ground-hugging member of the pea family forms an inch-tall mat and carpets the ground with color. It is a member of coastal grassland and prairie ecosystems.

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Seaside Bird’s-foot Trefoil’s flower clusters are made up of several tiny flowers each about half an inch long. The flowers have a bright yellow banner, or upper petal and bright pink or white lower petals.

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This plant is perennial, but is Winter dormant, so the aboveground parts die off each winter. As temperatures warm, underground rhizomes re-sprout and new plants spring to the surface.

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Seaside Bird’s-foot Trefoil is a nectar source for Painted Lady butterflies and a variety of native bees and other insects.

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This plant is also known as Harlequin Lotus, Witch’s Teeth, Harlequin Deer-vetch and Coast Lotus.

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Western White Trillium

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While hiking in the Santa Cruz Mountains, I came across this unmistakable and endearing plant that softly lights up the vernal understory of moist coniferous and mixed forests in California and some of its surrounding states. This plant is also known as Pacific Trillium, Coast Trillium, and Pacific Wake-robin. The “wake-robin” name refers to the plants early spring blooming season.

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This wildflower is easy to identify due to what looks like three showy white petals held just above three large triangular leaves. A perennial that grows from rhizomes, it technically produces no true leaves or stems above ground; the stems are considered an extension of the horizontal rhizome. The part of the plant that we notice most is an upright flowering stalk and the leaf-like structures are bracts, but most people call them leaves, because they photosynthesize.

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This is one of many types of flowers that rely on ants for the distribution of their seeds. The ants collect trillium seeds and bring them back to their nests. Trillium have a calorie-laden appendage on each seed called a strophiole. Ants eat the strophioles and discard the seeds, thus dispersing them to different parts of the woods. Ants have been observed to carry trillium seeds as far as thirty feet from the plant where they collected it from.

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Western White Trillium’s flowers bloom starting in late February in the southern part of its range and in March or April elsewhere. Citizen science observations of flowering plants of this species peak during the first week of April. Since White Trillium is Ohio’s State Wildflower, it was neat to see the West Coast species of this plant.

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Alpine Shooting Star

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While hiking on Mount Charleston near Las Vegas, Nevada, I came across this neat wildflower. This species ranges from northeast Oregon to the southern Cascades and Sierras and east to Utah and Arizona.

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This plant is a showy member of the Primrose Family. It is usually seen in in moist meadows and along streams at high elevations in mountains. It can best be described as locally common.

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The flower of Alpine Shooting Star resembles the shape of a rocket and its plume of exhaust. The “plume” of the petals reveals a fantastic transition of colors from near-black to yellow, white, and finally a lavender-pink.

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Each flower points downwards and a single, elongated stigma protrudes from the blossom, the “nose” of the rocket. Its is held firmly by four black anthers between the petals and the stigma.

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This plant is of special value to Bumble Bees and requires their ability to buzz-pollinate for successful reproduction. Buzz-pollination is a technique used to release pollen which is firmly held by the flower.

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Coralberry

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While visiting Carmel, Indiana for Thanksgiving, I went on a hike and noticed this plant. It is commonly called Coralberry, Buckbrush or Indian Currant and is a woody species of flowering plant in the Honeysuckle Family.

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This plant has a spectacular display of berries that mature in coincidence with Autumn colors each October. Its coral-pink to almost purplish berries are an attractive ornamental aspect that provides Winter forage for birds.

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In addition to birds, Coralberry supports a host of mammals, being a favorite deer browse plant, which inspired its alternative common name of Buckbrush. Although inconspicuous, its spring flowers support bees, wasps and flies with nectar and pollen.

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This dense, bushy deciduous shrub has soft downy foliage that makes an attractive leaf pattern. It typically grows 3 to 4 feet tall. It is also a host plant for the caterpillars of three native moths.

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Coralberry is native to the eastern and central United States as well as central Canada (Ontario) and northeastern Mexico.

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Twinleaf

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This is a wildflower that I noticed not because of its blossom, but rather due to its fruit, which resembles a green acorn. I came across it last Summer and went back in April of this year to see its flowers.

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Twinleaf’s large, conspicuous blooms feature eight snowy-white petals which drop within a day or so. This plant is a perennial and often forms small colonies.

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This wildflower features long-stemmed, blue-green leaves up to 6 inches long, which are deeply divided into two lobes that give the appearance of being two separate leaves, hence the common name.

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Its unusual seed pods are on stalks that have hinged lids that open to drop shiny, brown seeds for ants to scatter.

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This showy wildflower’s scientific name, Jeffersonia diphylla, commemorates our third president, Thomas Jefferson, who was a great naturalist and once president of the American Philosophical Society, which by the late 1700’s was the country’s leading scientific organization.

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Unlike many of Ohio’s Spring wildflowers, Twinleaf is not a true spring ephemeral, as its leaves remain green and actively produce chlorophyll throughout summer. It tends to grow in the rich, damp soils of deciduous forests.

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This neat plant is also known as Helmet Pod, Ground Squirrel Pea and is enjoyable to encounter on my northeast Ohio hikes.

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Giant Wakerobin

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01 California Common Scorpion_5814

While hiking along a woodland creek, I noticed this California species of spring-flowering perennial plant. It is found in the Pacific Coast Ranges and in the Sierra Nevada Foothills.

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Giant Wakerobin’s large, showy, solitary, three-parted flowers rise directly out of the leaves; its flower color is variable, but is most often dark red to white. Its leaves, which are up to 6 inches long and 5 inches wide, are in whorls of three and often mottled with dark blotches.

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It prefers a shady habitat and is clump-forming, growing to 12 to 18 inches tall. The plant often seen in wooded or streamside situations (or both). It is a classic Spring wildflower, in that it blooms from Spring until early Summer, when there are very few leaves on trees, allowing it to get the light that it needs.

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Trilliums use a strategy called myrmecochory for seed dispersal. A white, fleshy appendage on the seed tip is a nutrient-rich food packet that attracts ants. Ants carry seeds to their colony up to one mile away, feed the packet to their larvae, and discard the seeds, effectively planting them.

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Not only is it an interesting plant, Giant Wakerobin is an incredible beauty and a welcome sign of Spring.

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