NORWICH — Spring ephemeral wildflowers are perennial woodland plants that sprout from the ground early, bloom fast, and then go to seed—all before the canopy trees leaf out overhead. Often found in calcium-rich woods alongside Sugar Maple and Northern Maidenhair Fern, they include Dutchman’s Breeches, Blue Cohosh, Wild Ginger, spring beauty and hepatica.
The plants take advantage of the full sun reaching the forest floor during a short time in early spring. Once the forest floor is deep in shade, the plant’s leaves wither away, leaving only the roots, rhizomes, and bulbs underground.
Many of these plants rely on myrmecochory, seed dispersal by ants. The seeds of spring ephemerals bear fatty external appendages called elaiosomes. Ants harvest and carry them back to their nests just a couple of meters away to eat them (a single ant colony may collect as many as a thousand seeds over a season), and the unharmed seeds are thrown into the ants’ trash bin and eventually germinate.
Because short-distance dispersal is the norm, forest fragmentation is a threat to the survival of spring ephemerals. Once these plants are gone from a forest, they rarely return.
Long-term flowering records initiated by Henry David Thoreau in 1852 have been used in Massachusetts to monitor phenological changes. Phenology, the study of the timing of natural events such as leaf-out and flowering, helps unravel the effects of climate change on ecosystems. Record-breaking spring temperatures in 2010 and 2012 resulted in the earliest flowering times in recorded history for dozens of spring-flowering plants of the eastern United States.
Be like Thoreau and help monitor wildflower phenology. People can enter their observations of the spring ephemerals found this month on the website at iNaturalist Vermont. Include at least one photograph of the plant, and in the box next to “Add a field” type in Flowering Phenology, selecting “bare,” “flower,” or “fruit.”
Kent McFarland is a staff member of the Vermont Center of Ecostudies in Norwich.
