Don’t Miss The Spring Ephemerals––

Native Wildflowers Now In Bloom

By Dottie Evans

To catch our first glimpse of woodland wildflowers, there’s no time like the present because soon they’ll be gone.

Hence their name, spring ephemerals.

“They grow in the woods and have their entire life cycle from flowering to setting seed over just six weeks,” said John Longstreth, director of Southbury’s Bent-of-the-River Audubon Center.

It’s the spring season –– early April to late May ––  when the strengthening sun shines down through bare branches providing enough light for these delicate plants and flowers to thrive.

Then the leaves are full out, the forest floor darkens, and that’s it until next year.

Speaking on March 31 to an audience of winter-weary gardeners who are members of the Horticulture Club of Newtown, Mr Longstreth covered the gamut of familiar favorites. His colorful slides flashed one after another on the walls of the Newtown Meeting House common room and brought forth admiring comments from the audience.

Bloodroot, spring beauty, Dutchman’s breeches, Solomon seal, red trillium, lady slippers –– many evoked recollections of past springs and for a little while, helped to blot out the reality of icy rain pelting down outside.

“In one sense, we’ve got a greater opportunity than ever to see these woodland flowers because Connecticut is fast returning to a heavily forested state,” he said.

Though one would think this factor would work in favor of Connecticut wildflowers, other factors threaten their success, he added. The forest floor is changing and being depleted due to over-grazing of deer. And many long-established stands of wildflowers like lady slippers have been reduced or wiped out by people digging them up to transplant them into their own gardens.

“We tell people never to harvest them, just enjoy them and leave them be –– unless the bulldozers are coming and they’ve got permission from the landowner to go in first.”

The best preventative medicine and the surest way to preserve these rare wildflowers is to save their habitat.

“They are perfectly adapted to our environment and they don’t need chemicals to survive. They are part of our local ecosystem,” Mr Longstreth noted.

Asked what distinguishes a native wildflower from an alien or introduced species, Mr Longstreth offered this simple definition: “A native plant is anything that grew in North America before the Europeans came here.”

Summer Wildflowers                        Need Shrubby Fields

Moving on from spring to summer, Mr Longstreth showed his audience examples of common native wildflowers that one finds here in July and August.

“I remember as a kid riding my bike down the dirt roads of this area, and everywhere I looked it seemed there were old shrubby fields,” John Longstreth said, adding these fields are prime habitat for summer wildflowers like milkweed, black-eyed Susans, asters, goldenrods, and tall Joe-Pye-weed.

“That’s the habitat that is now the rarest in the state, and we’re losing what’s left to development,” Mr Longstreth said.

To mediate this trend, the 660-acre Audubon Center in Southbury has taken great care to preserve and even create the shrubby field habitat, as well as to grow native grasses and wildflowers to encourage the special birds and butterflies that nest and find nectar there.

“You have no idea how hard it is to keep a shrubby field from growing back into forest,” he commented wryly.

Invasive species such as oriental bittersweet, multiflora rose, autumn olive, and barberry must constantly be removed. Also on his must-eradicate list are goutweed, garlic mustard, phragmites, and purple loosestrife, which is taking over Connecticut wetlands.

Some species such as black-eyed Susans do well in our summer fields and roadsides, he said, but they have not always been native to this area.

“That’s a Great Plains wildflower that came back east as seeds in someone’s pants cuff,” he remarked.

Carolyn Longstreth, his wife, sat in the audience through the early part of the lecture and then stepped forward to tell about her own experiences growing native wildflowers from seed. An experienced birdwatcher, she is a member of the board of the Lillinonah Audubon Society that makes its headquarters at Bent-of-the-River.

“We’ve been refurbishing the area behind the education barn at The Bent as a butterfly garden and bird sanctuary. It’s now in its third year,” she said.

Mrs Longstreth has been gathering wildflower seeds and is actively propagating certain species such as wild red columbine, blue cohosh, lobelia, and cardinal flower for use in the butterfly garden.

By growing the native plants, she hopes to provide a food source for certain plant-specific butterflies such as the checkerspot that feeds only on turtlehead, or the monarch that feeds on milkweed flowers, and then lays eggs on milkweed leaves where the larva will also feed.

“It’s a work in progress, and I’m still learning,” she said of the demonstration garden.