Fleeting pleasures: The spring ephemerals

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Trout lilies bloom around the opening of trout season. — Judy Gallagher/Flickr

These mornings when I leave the house, I pass the cheery sight of little crocus and irises beaming up at me along the path to the garden gate. I slow my pace and exclaim over their Lilliputian loveliness — it’s a good way to start the day.

These are two of my earliest bloomers, an ever-so-welcome sight as we commence with spring. Much as I love these refined little critters — products of the Dutch breeders’ art — my heart belongs to their wild relations, the native wildflowers known as spring ephemerals.

“Ephemeral” means brief and fleeting and these denizens of the deciduous woods sprout and flower before the canopy leafs out, shading the ground. By the time the trees are clad in mature green and the days have warmed (in early May, let’s say), the ephemerals have waxed and waned, flowered and borne fruit or seed, and often have disappeared entirely.

It’s another of Nature’s sleight-of-hand tricks — catch them while you can or you will lose your chance for another year. Depending on the weather, the ephemerals are among us between late February and late April, hiding in the woodlands and wetlands where you must go to seek them out. A crocus is a tame thing but a wake-robin or a trout lily is ordinarily a creature of the wild.

Hugging the ground on short stems, these wayward beauties take advantage of the high soil nutrient levels resulting from the decay of autumn leaves and the ground moisture that buffers the extremes of night and day temperatures. Some also have hairy leaves that trap warm air like a fur coat or special oils that render their seeds attractive to ants who carry them off and drag them underground. These are all clever strategies for survival.

One of the best things about the ephemerals is their evocative names, redolent with the scent and sense of spring. They are charming on the tongue, a bit of sweetness so piercing it cannot last.

Wake-robins (as if the early bird needed an alarm clock!) are more formally known as trilliums and have a tricorn arrangement of three pristine white petals. Trout lilies, also known as dog-tooth violet and botanically as Erythronium americanum, prefer damp stream margins and bloom right around the opening of trout season on the second Saturday of April.

Wake robin or trillium. — Upupa4me/Flickr

Their low-lying leaves are a mottled green and purple as dappled as a fawn’s flanks. Hopefully their yellow, downward-facing flowers are showy enough or their colonies large enough to escape the tramp of men in boots bearing fly rods.

How about Dutchman’s breeches (Dicentra cucullaria), a plant that produces waxy white flowers that resemble pantaloons hanging upside-down to dry? This one is related to the old-fashioned bleeding heart (Dicentra spectabilis), a cultivated favorite in woodland gardens.

The dramatically named bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) curls its leaves up around milky white flowers like follies girls framing their faces in feather fans. The plant is known as red puccoon from the Native American word “pak” or blood; the natives used the vivid red sap in dyes and as face paint.

The shooting star (Dodecatheon) looks something like a transistorized florist’s cyclamen, bearing pink petals flung up in exclamation above the little nose at the center of the blossom. You’d have to hunt hard for hepatica, which sounds like a perfume your grandmother might have worn, but it resembles a white or lilac buttercup with a pincushion of white stamens in the middle. In fact, some flowers are scented, but whether it’s the white or the tinted in any given year is mysteriously unpredictable.

In wet places along stream banks, look for skunk cabbage and marsh marigolds. The former have weird, mottled, cone-shaped spathes within which the true flowers hide. Marsh marigolds, which love boggy soil, are a shot of pure gold,

The showiest of spring’s fleeting blossoms has to be the native orchid known as pink lady’s slipper. A late bloomer (April to July), it appears to be too exotic to spring from ordinary forest duff with its broad twin leaves and fleshy pouch of a flower.

Now rare in the wild, it suffers the same fate as many of these diminished natural treasures — death by deer. The deer vacuum up the succulent new wildflower shoots along with the new-sprung sapling trees that represent the woodland’s future. Common or rare, it matters not to the deer. Sadly, ours may be the last generation to find ephemeral wildflowers in their native habitat.

I’d say get them while they’re hot.

Marsh marigolds at streamside. — Erik Tjallinks/Flickr

Places to try in New Jersey:

  • Above Buttermilk Falls in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. Trailhead is off Mountain Road in Layton, N.J. Office, 1978 River Road, Bushkill, Pa. Call (570) 426-2452.

  • Cheesequake State Park, 300 Gordon Road, Matawan. Call (732) 566-2161. Good spot for lady slippers.

  • Emilie K. Hammond Wildflower Trail in Tourne County Park, McCaffrey Lane, Boonton Township. April is prime time. Maintained by the Rockaway Valley Garden Club.

  • Hacklebarney State Park, 119 Hacklebarney Road, between Long Valley and Chester. Call (908) 638-8572.

  • Musconetcong Gorge Preserve, 182 Dennis Road, Bloomsbury. Call (908) 782-1158.

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