By Sona Mason
A secret joy of exploring the forest in early spring is to suddenly come upon a carpet of golden flowers where there were only brown leaves. Trout lilies are among the earliest of the spring ephemeral flowers to bloom in the year, providing emerging pollinators much needed relief. Out of the masses of brown-spotted gray-green elliptical leaves which give the lilies their common name, relatively few will bloom. It takes a lot of accumulated energy for a tiny plant to produce a one-inch flower. Even so, a mass-flowering is a sight to lift the heart at the tail-end of winter cold.
On closer inspection, each morning the delicate flowers bow their heads and unfurl their yellow petals back and upward, revealing the brown velvet stamens. They open for business during the day and close up at night, and their beauty rivals that of orchids.
Low to the ground, trout lilies produce myrmecochorous seed capsules, carried off by ants to feed the eliasome to their larvae. The eliasosome is a fat-and-protein filled tissue that the plants reward the ants for carrying the seed away from the parent plant, to help spread it around and also avoid root competition with the parent plant. The uneaten seed capsules are discarded in the ant nest underground, where they draw nutrients from decomposing materials. They begin their life in this protected environment.
The species also produce asexually via tiny bulblets budding off the parent. These bulbs, or corms, then move the daughter plant away from the parent by growing into a fleshy underground stem which produces a bulb at the tip. The slow growing tiny plants can take seven years to mature from seed, and a year to flower after transplanting the corm.
Within two weeks the golden carpet has vanished back into the leaf litter, making you wonder if you really saw it.
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