BLOOMERS!

Spring wildflowers are popping

As soon as the ground thaws in later March, pocket gophers start leaving their mounds in Iowa pastures.

Just as gopher mounds seem to pop up at the first sign of greening in pastures, spring ephemerals greet the new season amidst the brown, dead leaves in woodlands. The tiny wildflowers have evolved to bloom before leaf-out on the trees, so they can capture the sunlight before the forest floor turns shady.

The ground-hugging snow trillium is one of Iowa’s first spring flowers. True to their name, trilliums often get snowed on.

In our part of northeast Iowa, we can count on snow trilliums to emerge first. On a north-facing slope along the Turkey River, the three-petaled beauties sometimes poke through lingering snow, as their name might suggest, or at least may get coated with a late March or early April snowy blanket.

The “spring beauty” really is. The pink streaks on the dainty, half-inch blossoms, make them some of the prettiest spring ephemerals.

Finding the first trilliums means it’s time to start snooping for other “spring beauties” – literally. The spring beauty has slender, grass-like leaves, and a blossom with five petals streaked in pink. It takes sharp eyes to find the first flowers, which only open when it’s sunny. Insects may lead you there, though, as wasps and other pollinators search out the blossoms for a bit of nectar and pollen.

SO white! But bloodroot petals don’t last long.

Another early bloomer, bloodroot, gets its name – no surprise!- from the reddish juice flowing from a broken root or stem. Its eight or more petals are the epitomy of white, but they seldom last long before falling to the ground to leave an erect stem clasped by a lobed green leaf.

Hepatics are among the earliest bloomers. Do hairy stems protect them from the cold?

While bloodroots first appear in sunnier spots, hepaticas thrive on shadier, cooler slopes. Could their hairy stems help them withstand the cold? The name evolved from the Greek word hepatikos, meaning liver, because early botanists thought the mottled, three-lobed leaves resembled a liver. The leaves may linger through the winter, but they’re generally buried under leaf litter and hard to find in spring. The flowers often grow in clusters, however, with a bouquet of 3 or more showy blossoms ranging from white to deep purple. To taxonomists, the flowers have 6 to 10 “sepals,” even though we amateurs call them petals.

Pollinating insects seek out the first spring blooms, such as this hepatica.

Gardeners may notice the resemblance between cultivated bleeding hearts and wild Dutchman’s breeches. The stems of Dutchman’s breeches sprout flowers that look like upside-down pants hanging on a clothesline.

Feathery leaves and tiny buds soon will give way to a clothesline full of “Dutchman’s Breeches.”

The feathery leaves appear first, with the “breeches” later dangling from upright or drooping stems.

Pinkish rue anemones have just started to appear on a sunny bank at our farm – but they’ll persist another month or more when the weather warms. They typically have six petals (OK, sepals!)

There aren’t many pinks as pink as the blossoms of rue anemone.

As we’re seeing-hearing-feeling spring come alive with returning birds and greening trees, we check off each first-of-the-year species of flower yet to come, as well: bellwort, Virginia bluebells, columbine, anemone, wild geranium, May apple, wild ginger. And soon it will be morel mushroom time . . . But that’s another story!

Pollinating insects and wildflowers have evolved together, with the first spring pollinators becoming active as the flowers begin to bloom. A wasp welcomed these spring beauties.

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