Just missed it! I was hoping to take a photo of a queen bumblebee gathering pollen on the wildflower Dutchman’s Breeches (Dicentra cucullaria). As I looked away for one moment, the bee flew onto the plant two feet in front of me and flew off just as I saw it. I have heard that these flowers are an important early nectar source for queen bumblebees, who need to gather pollen for their new broods. I look forward every spring to seeing these wildflowers and their pollinating insects again, but there aren’t as many of either as there used to be.

Wildflowers such as Dutchman’s Breeches are called spring ephemerals. They emerge through the leaf litter here in Connecticut in March and April to take advantage of the short window of spring sunlight and flowering before leaves in the tree canopy above grow to shade them out. By summer, you would never know that they had been here.

The flowers of Dutchman’s Breeches look like upside-down pantaloons, hence the name. Walking along the nearby Farmington Canal Greenway this week, I came upon a nice patch in full bloom. It’s amazing to me how many people walked or rode by and didn’t look down and see them. Two researchers in 1998 called this “plant blindness,” for our inability to notice plants in our environment, which has consequences for conservation and human health.

The Trout Lily (Erythronium americanum) is another ephemeral found in the eastern United States. Also called Fawn Lily, its leaves resemble a speckled brook trout, or a fawn’s mottled fur. Another name is Dogtooth Violet for its pointed bulbs, although the plant is a member of the lily family and is not a true violet. Look for paired leaves because those will be the plants that will flower. It can take up to seven years for Trout Lily to flower, and only about half a percent of the plants in a patch will do so. Some patches, though can be up to 300 years old!

Blood Root (Sanguinaria canadensis) isn’t a true ephemeral. Its leaves often don’t die back quickly, but it’s flowers last only a few days. However, the plant shares its seed dispersal strategy with many ephemerals. Blood Root, Trout Lily, and Dutchman’s Breeches all develop elaiosomes, fleshy structures full of lipids that are attached to seeds. Ants are attracted to these fatty structures and take them underground to their colony to feed on them. The seeds are then deposited in their subterranean waste pile, where they are fertilized and grow. This strategy is called myrmecochory. Blood Root gets its name from its scarlet sap, once used as a dye by Eastern Woodlands peoples.

How important are plant–pollinator relationships! Many of our insect pollinators, so critical for our own survival, are also vital for our spring flora. Among these are small solitary bees in the genus Andrena. There are specialist bees that are dependent on certain plants and the plants on them. The Trout Lily Bee (Andrena erythronii) only gathers pollen from the Trout Lily and the bee Andrena erigeniae only visits the flowers of Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica).

Unfortunately, many native wildflower species are decreasing, and with them their specialist pollinators. Habitat fragmentation plays a big part in this. But increasingly significant are the introduced, invasive plants that are taking over. On a recent walk, I found a few patches of Blood Root completely surrounded by thousands of Garlic Mustard (Allaria petiolata) seedlings. Garlic Mustard not only can choke out our native plants, but research has shown that this invasive has allelopathic chemicals that can kill important soil fungi, preventing many plants from growing near it. Each Garlic Mustard plant can produce more than 5,000 seeds that can remain viable in the soil for five years or more.

I see more Mugwort (Artemesia vulgaris) and Japanese Knotweed (Fallopia japonica) around too. These introduced plants do not contribute to our local ecosystems. They don’t have insects who co-evolved with them to eat their leaves or who are specialists to rely on their nectar and pollen and they can choke out native plants. As entomologist Doug Tallamy observes, “this is a growing problem for humanity because it is the plants and animals around us that produce the life support we all depend on. Every time a species is lost from an ecosystem, that ecosystem is less able to support us.” So, one way for you and your family to exercise during COVID-19 social distancing and help the environment is by removing these plants from your yard or neighborhood and putting them in the trash. Garlic Mustard’s mature, second year plants can be hand-pulled fairly easily.

You can add many of these spring ephemerals to your garden after removing invasive plants. But please don’t dig them from the wild. Many local nurseries are now carrying these wildflowers, but be sure to ask whether the plants are nursery propagated. Plant them in a soil enriched with compost where they will receive light shade and part sun in the summer. Make sure they don’t dry out in the spring. You only need add a thin layer of ground-up leaves (your mower works well for this) in the spring or fall. The bees will thank you.

When I was a kid growing up in northern New Jersey, my friends and I often explored the wilds of the neighborhood. Many of the forests and fields where we found box turtles then are now suburban lots and corporate headquarters. My friend Rick and I would tromp through slick, muddy swamps and fens to hunt frogs and occasionally chase each other with the torn, foul smelling leaves of the Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus).

Leaves that smell like a skunk—an interesting strategy for a plant to keep from being eaten. Although I have heard that bears, when they emerge hungry from their dens, will eat the young leaves.

The leaves are not the only part of the plant with a scent. Weeks ago, I headed to nearby wetlands to see this “first wildflower of spring.” The red and yellow mottled hoods of the Skunk Cabbage, which are modified leaves called a spathe, had emerged through the snow and ice, looking like they melted the area around them. That’s actually what happens. Remarkably, as the plant uses starches stored within it in respiration it can heat itself up as much as 36 degrees above the air temperature!

The flower cluster inside the spathe is the spadix, a rounded head of tightly packed flowers. This flower head also puts out that skunky smell, and the heated air spreads it around to attract carrion-feeding flies and gnats to encourage pollination. It’s amazing that there are flies out pollinating flowers in February and early March.

Pollinators are really important. More than 90% of flowering plants need them to spread pollen from one flower to another to fertilize those flowers so that fruits can form. We often think of only bees and butterflies as pollinators, but in fact flies are the second most prolific pollinators behind bees.

Right now, the large, dark green leaves of the Skunk Cabbage are about at half their full size. When fully developed, the broad deep green leaves look like cabbage. They are spongy and full of water. When the trees above are fully leafed out, Skunk Cabbage leaves begin to fade. Because no woody material is left behind with this true spring ephemeral, by late summer you wouldn’t even know that Skunk Cabbage had been there.

But their spreading roots are still below the ground. Those roots have pulled the stem downward. As the plant ages it grows deeper and deeper into the soil, waiting for late winter and early spring to begin the cycle all over again.

Many of us have taken to the outdoors recently. I don’t have to tell you why. It’s a great way to get exercise and still maintain social distancing. So if you’ve been out walking, you might be asking yourself, “What’s all that quacking going on?”
No, Daffy is still safe in cartoonland and mallards are not quacking in the middle of woods. For one thing, it’s not their usual habitat.
You are hearing the mating call of the male Wood Frog, Rana sylvatica, a brown, dark-masked amphibian with a fascinating life history. In the early spring, sometimes as early as February, when the first “warm” rains come with a temperature above 44 degrees F (7 degrees C), wood frogs crawl out of the leaf litter and head for vernal (literally meaning spring) pools. These often temporary and usually shallow pools are found in forests in the Appalachians, New England, and most of Canada and Alaska. By using these temporary pools, the frogs avoid being eaten by fish.
These frogs have been semi-frozen in the leaf litter all winter. In the late fall when temperatures drop to freezing, special proteins cause the water in the frog’s blood to freeze first. This pulls out most of the water in its cells. While this is happening, its liver is pumping sugar (glucose) into the cells. This “anti-freeze” keeps the cells from freezing. Everything then shuts down—no beating heart or other functions!
This unique adaptation has enabled wood frogs to survive as far north as above the Arctic Circle. Scientists are studying this freeze-and-thaw cycle and hope what they learn can help with human organ transplants.
Back to the quacking. Check out the Wood Frog’s call and others on the Yale Peabody Museum Vertebrate Zoology Collection’s Online Guide to the Reptiles and Amphibians of Connecticut. After attracting a mate with its calls, the male Wood Frog externally fertilizes her eggs in the vernal pool. A female will lay an average of 1,750 eggs. Once the eggs have hatched, it’s a race for the tadpoles to develop into froglets and get out of the water before the vernal pool dries up in the heat of summer.

Click here to see the interesting findings that David Skelly, Peabody Director and Frank R. Oastler Professor of Ecology, and his graduate students have made in their study of wood frogs. Photo by Peter Paplanus from St. Louis, MO/ccby http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0