These early bloomers are some of the most welcome sights after a long, drab winter.
Hi, this is Scott Fitzpatrick from New Hampshire Audubon, bringing you Something Wild.
Hallelujah! Just when we think we can’t take the deathly drabness of winter any more, flowers appear. Two of the earliest, and prettiest, blooms are both members of the buttercup family.
If you see bright golden flowers in a wet area, they are probably marsh marigolds. Perhaps Tennyson said it best, “And the wild marsh-marigold shines like fire in swamps and hollows gray.â€
These sturdy, showy plants like to have wet feet and can be found in marshes, wet meadows, and in slow-moving streams. Twelve inch mounds of waxy, rounded, deep green leaves burst like miracles out of the muck and are topped by clusters of cheery yellow flowers. The shiny blossoms have five sepals, not true petals, and have fluffy, pollen-laden stamens.
Round-lobed hepaticas are more demure, but just as lovely. They are not rare, but they’re not exactly common, either. They need habitat that has not been disturbed by development or exotic invasive plants.
The one inch flowers, on top of furry stems, emerge from the leaf-litter in mixed, well-drained, deciduous forests. Hepaticas can be pink, white, or pale violet, and usually have six petal-like sepals. The leaves are almost evergreen, but by now have usually been flattened by snow. So clumps of these shy, dainty flowers seem to bloom without any leaves at all. New leaves will appear after the flowers have faded away.
Hepaticas, like many spring wildflowers, depend upon ants for successful seed dispersal. Ants collect the seeds and take them back to their nests, which provide just the right conditions for germination.
These flowers are the perfect antidote to the winter blahs. You can learn more about our spring wildflowers on field trips with New Hampshire Audubon, and the Forest Society.
For Something Wild, I’m Scott Fitzpatrick.
Something Wild is a joint production of New Hampshire Audubon, New Hampshire Public Radio, and the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.
