I’ve been laid quite low this week by illness, which by all rights shouldn’t be a real surprise—I live with a pre-schooler and my work is public-facing. But after an entire winter of dodging every bug to hit my household, I will admit to feeling irrationally invulnerable when I was finally able to fling the windows open a couple weeks back, like I had gotten to the finish line. In some ways it feels gentler to be sick in spring, as cool, humid fresh air is kinder on the sinuses than forced air heat. But in other ways it’s worse—being stuck in bed when spring, the briefest and best-of-all seasons, is happening outside the window in what feels like one fleeting exhale of tender colors…
So to live a bit vicariously through one of my favorite obsessive photo collections, I’ll be taking you on a virtual walk in the woods to coo over ~❃spring ephemerals❃~ this week and next. Please enjoy, and if able, go and smell the tiny flowers~
Spring ephemerals are a beloved little grouping of wildflowers categorized not by taxonomic ties but by their shared survival strategies: They are typically small and discreet understory dwellers which emerge, photosynthesize and bloom all before the trees above have unfurled their shading leaves. More often than not, even their foliage dies back soon thereafter, leaving few signs of their perennial existence for nine or ten months out of the year. In their season, however, their blooms are like so many small, tender miracles—catching the eye among an expanse of mud-soaked duff and sending an aromatic invitation to early-emerging pollinators who managed to survive the winter.
Today, I’m highlighting three ephemerals that have something even more delightfully specific in common about their lifecycles: trout lily, trillium and bloodroot all rely on a mutualistic relationship with ants, called myrmecochory, to disperse their seeds. Myrmecochorous (say it aloud and thank me later) plants produce seeds with a little something extra, a fatty deposit called an elaisome, that is very attractive to ants as a food source. Worker ants cart the seeds back to their colonies to help feed the larvae, and when the elaisome is done they take the remaining seed (intact, from the plant’s perspective) to the midden chamber. They say one man’s trash is another’s treasure, and nowhere is this more true than compost: one animal’s pile of decaying refuse is so often a plant’s idea of heavenly food—the perfect place to take root.12
Myrmecochory certainly benefits both partners—the ants receive a nutritious food in the early season, before much else is available, and the plants’ seeds are more likely to germinate in turn. However while ants can create some beneficial distance between parent and offspring, enough that the two are not in direct competition, they obviously cannot travel far and fast like birds can. In fact, glacial doesn’t really begin to cover plant migration at ant speeds.3 How, then, has a tiny plant like yellow trout lily spread across more than a third of this continent? One current theory out of Cornell is that deer play a role as well: digesting some seeds and passing others whole, deer may be responsible for large-scale plant disperals, both of native wildflowers like spring ephemerals and of unchecked introduced species like multiflora rose.4
Stay tuned next week for more on spring ephemerals! Fingers crossed I’m on the mend and able to add another hundred wildflower photos to the cloud by then~
https://www.bbg.org/article/native_spring_ephemerals
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2003/07/deer-help-disperse-seeds-including-noxious-weeds#:~:text=%22The%20good%20news%20is%20that,of%20ecology%20and%20evolutionary%20biology.
Ella and I have loved finding the trout lily and blood roots blooming in our neck of the bioregion. Maybe Trillium will reveal themselves to us too this season🤍
What region is this in? I am wondering if I have any of these :0