| Home page |
Wildflower of the month Take a close look at spring beauties By Dr. Lynda
Richards March weather
may be “iffy,” but spring
beauties, Claytonia virginica, are for sure. Sometimes
they can be found blooming already in February, and they will still be
around as late as May. The long blooming period is only one of their
many charms. Spring beauties
occur throughout the entire eastern half of the Every sighted
person in the Ozarks surely has seen this wildflower! In Rolla, just
look at the lawns along Each plant can
have as many as 20 flowers, but they open only a few at a time. A
spent flower arches downward on the stem, and becomes a capsule with a few
tiny black seeds. The stems are rather weak, the leaves long and
narrow. Spring beauties
are a good excuse to put off mowing for a few more weeks, to set the mower
a couple inches higher, and to forego broadcast lawn herbicides that kill
everything but the grass, at least on part of the yard. Most references
cite the edibility of all parts of this plant, from the flowers to the
tiny “bulb” (really a corm—an enlarged stem base). Native
Americans and European Spring beauties
are one of the “spring ephemeral” wildflowers. Ephemeral means
“a single day” or, more broadly, “temporary.” The spring
ephemerals all share a peculiar lifestyle: they hide out underground
as a bulb, corm or tuber for most of the year, then burst forth in spring
and complete their whole life cycle, buds to flowers to seeds, in the
short time before other larger plants shade them out. Anemones,
bloodroots, toothworts, hepaticas, fawn lilies or dogtooth violets, and
Dutchman’s breeches are some of our other spring ephemerals. Our
cultivated narcissus, daffodils, jonquils, tulips, hyacinths, and crocus
are spring ephemerals imported from other continents. Dr. Lynda Richards, of Rolla, retired Mark Twain National Forest ecologist, leads Wildflower Walks for the Ozark Rivers chapter of the National Audubon Society and is a Phelps County Master Gardener. |
them.
Up close, each of the five petals is more or less striped or veined with
pale pink to dark rose, like those ubiquitous cellophaned peppermints.
These flowers always make me think of the girls who used to volunteer at
the hospital; “candy-stripers” we called them, in their red-striped
pinafores. On cloudy days, or when picked and brought indoors, the
flowers close up.
settlers ate the flowers and leaves in salads or as
cooked greens. Boiled in salted water, the starchy corms are said to
taste like chestnuts. Rodents and even bears dig and eat the corms;
rabbits and deer browse the tops.