Here Today, Gone Tomorrow? Traces of Spring Ephemerals in the Summer Garden

easily. They sometimes take two years to germinate and five years to mature into an edible delight.

By Barry Glick

“Here’s the rub,” as our dear old friend Billy (Shakespeare that is) would say. This is a monthly publication and I’m a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute kind of guy. I spend most of my time in the woods and things change quickly, sometimes even spontaneously. This makes it difficult for me to apprise you of what you may be missing at any given moment in time—some of the most precious of our native wildflowers, the spring ephemerals, that are fleeting in nature, gone in a heartbeat.

Unless we kept in touch daily, I’d be missing opportunities to share new discoveries and old friends with you. Through the miracle of modern photography and print publication though, I’ll share a “roadmap” of some interesting plants that you can discover on your own. Even though they may seem to have vanished from the face of the Earth this late in the season, many have left a remembrance—a clue, if you will—for you to find them next spring: a dried-up leaf, a flower stalk, a seed pod that lasts into fall; et cetera, et cetera.

Some even leave us in the spring, only to return for a mid-summer engagement. One treasure that fits that description is Allium tricoccum, the plant that made my home state of West Virginia famous. You may be acquainted with this plant under its “common” local name, “Ramps.” Yes, Ramps as we know them are among our earliest friends—one that we look forward to all winter. When they emerge with their two very sexy, lily-like leaves, we know that the show has started. However, It’s not long before those two sexy, dark-green, supple leaves turn yellow and disappear. What’s not visible to the naked eye are the bio-chemical machinations occurring in that little underground chemical factory—the bulb.

One of my very, very favorites and the original inspiration for this article is our native Dwarf Larkspur (Delphinium tricorne). Almost everyone is familiar with the large, long-stemmed Delphiniums that are used by commercial florists. These Delphs are from a biennial species in the genus Delphinium. Our native resident (Delphinium tricorne, pictured at left), on the other hand, is a perennial plant that not only returns every spring from the tuberous rhizome that it grows from, but also seeds itself around to form a delightful colony. If you should miss the bloom, you can try to look for the unique three-pointed seed pod that gave this plant its scientific name.

Before we know it, right smack-dab in the middle of where once two leaves resided after about a month-long wait, there appears a 12–18" stalk with a single globular white flower that lasts longer than the leaves did. That flower provides nectar and pollen to the many tiny little creatures that fly and crawl around in the woods. Eventually, there is sex as we know it and the minute pollen grains find their way down the pollen tubes, meet the ovaries, and create seeds. It takes the rest of the summer and most of autumn for these very visible seeds to ripen, offering us yet another clue to where to find a plant in the spring. The seeds (pictured above) in themselves are very attractive: the blackest-black and so shiny that we can almost use them as a mirror.

You can grow Ramps from seed very

Another somewhat ephemeral spring wildflower is Jeffersonia diphylla. Its common name is Twinleaf and it’s in the same family as May Apple (Podophyllum peltatum) and Blue Cohosh (Caulophyllum thalictroides). More about those guys at a later date. Jeffersonia, named for Thomas Jefferson is only half ephemeral: The lovely, pure-white, silver dollar-sized flower shatters when hit by a raindrop or a stiff breeze. This plant, however, is very robust, will last all the growing season long, and even looks like a small shrub when it matures. It has very unusual seed pods that are tubular, with a little lid on the top that opens when the seeds are ripe. The pod is full of medium-sized, shiny-brown seeds. This is an easy plant to grow from seed. The plant itself is very reliably perennial.

There you have it for now. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the astounding array of perennial wildflower plants native to the Mid-Atlantic region. Shut off your television and get out to start discovering the wonders of nature and appreciate the amazing area that we are fortunate enough to live in. o

Barry Glick, a transplanted Philadelphian, has been residing in Greenbrier County, WV, since 1972. His mountaintop garden and nursery is a mecca for gardeners from virtually every country in the world. He writes and lectures extensively about native plants and Hellebores, his two main specialties, and welcomes visitors with advance notice. He can be reached at barry@sunfarm.com, www. sunfarm.com, or 304.497.2208.