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Time for the Wildflowers
Written By: Dr. Gary Wein - Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust | Issue: May 2023 | Photograph By: Andrew Renfro
Our loamy forest floors are rich with splashes of color.
Spring is Here!
I love springtime, the leafless forest begins to show life as the wildflowers begin to emerge.
The light environment in a dormant forest is great for those plants that can handle temperature fluctuations of spring. It’s risky to emerge and flower early, there is the potential of getting killed by a springtime frost.
Among the first plants to emerge here in the mountains of Macon and Jackson Counties are Oconee Bells, Bloodroot, Liverwort, Toothworts, and Trout Lily. All of these plants have something in common, they are long-lived clonal perennials. While they have pretty flowers, sex can be risky behavior when cold weather could mean pollinators don’t show up.
The spring woodland plants are adapted to continue to reproduce via vegetative reproduction clones to survive to another day when flowering could be successful. Clonal production is also a hedge against herbivory.
The plants that come later in the spring are the showy Trilliums, Solomon’s Seal, Bellwort, Yellow Mandarin, and Violets (to name just a few). These later emerging plants tend to belong to the Lily family (not the Violets), have spear-shaped emerging shoots, and are ant-dispersed. In that one sentence I have listed the topics of a plethora of botanical doctoral dissertations and perhaps a future article.
Some suggest that the early spring of 2023 is due to climate change. Well…maybe, but keep in mind that spring of 2021 was late. The early spring of 2023 and its interruption by a cold snap in mid-March may be due more to weather variability than climate change. Emergence of the spring ephemerals are triggered by soil temperatures while the forest trees leaf emergence respond to day length.
The best forests in our region to find spring wildflowers are in rich cove forests, sites with richer and moister soils. The finest of those can be found at Whitewater Falls, High Falls/Rough Run, and my favorite Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest. There are many others but there isn’t space here to list them all.
Indeed, spring is the perfect time to get outside, enjoy nature, and explore the many wild and wonderful places in and around Highlands and Cashiers. If you love our natural place and want to learn more about the organization that is conserving our most ecologically valuable land for the benefit of ours and future generations, visit hicashlt.org or contact Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust at [email protected].
photos by Andrew Renfro
