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April is the usual month for those exotic beauties known as the "spring ephemerals", fragile wildflowers that pop up in a brief window of opportunity.
When the weather has warmed, and sunlight still reaches the forest floor because the trees have not yet leafed, these startling blossoms appear, usually on a rocky slope with rich and damp but consistently draining soil. They are arresting partly because there are so few flowers at this time of the year, at least in the drab, leafless woods, but also because each of them is unusual in form and often most unflowerlike. Dutchman’s breeches, for instance, has flowers that look like a pair of white knickers hanging on a clothesline. It is closely related to the wild white bleeding heart, which may bloom nearby. Both species have tender, feathery foliage in a shade of dusty gray-green, almost as delicate and enchanting as the translucent flowers. Brush the leaves gently against your hand for a lovely sensation of softness. Wild ginger’s broadly heart-shaped leaves hover over a short-lived and strange blossom, a brownish-purple bloom of almost hideous beauty. It arises beneath the heart-shaped, ground-hugging leaves. The flower is a little cup with three long points coming off the lip. Just below the surface of the soil run rhizomes, the underground stems by which wild ginger propagates itself. These structures look like roots, and if you scratch one, you will detect the gingery smell which gives the plant its name, although it is not related to the tropical plant we use in cooking. One of the strangest ephemerals is blue cohosh, which looks, when young, like an alien from outer space. It can be quite a shock to come upon a patch for the first time, with their bluish-purple stems and leaves folded up like contorted fingers. If they are in flower, they will have small, five-petaled “eyes” with yellow centers. By May, these creatures will have turned green and bushy, knee-high, with beautiful, three-lobed leaves. The dogtooth violet takes a more conventional shape, like other violet flowers, except that it is not purple but a cheerful yellow. Trout lily’s yellow flowers start out trumpet-shaped, and then the petals curve back away from the red stamens. There is a tan stripe along the back of each petal. This plant’s shiny, narrow leaves occur in large groups on the forest floor. They are dappled with silvery blotches reminiscent of an out-of-focus photograph or the scaly flank of its namesake trout. The leaves are edible, curiously moist and fleshy, with a shifting, sweet-sharp flavor. Newly emerged hepatica has fuzzy, three-lobed leaves with tiny blossoms of breathtaking fragility, in shades of magenta, purple, or palest pink. A little plant known as spring beauty features white flowers with jaunty pink candy-cane stripes running the length of each of the five petals. Alongside the oddball flowers, wild leeks often grow, an early and delicious spring edible that is sought after by foragers. Although they may be abundant where they occur, many of the ephemerals are endangered and should be treated with utmost respect.
The copyright of the article Spring Ephemerals in Plant Species is owned by Violet Snow. Permission to republish Spring Ephemerals in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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