Originally known as “Wake Robin”, Red Trillium’s life cycle is synchronized with the area it inhabits. (photo submitted)
Like all forests around us, Schuylkill Center is in bloom right now. You really have to see it to believe it. In fact, as long as you walk down our Ravine Loop.
Like the red trillium in the accompanying photo, this elusive and rare plant is called “robin” by New Englanders because it blooms there when the robins migrate back north (robins live year-round at Roxborough).
Or the Virginia hyacinth in the other photo – one of everyone’s favourites, as it towers above many spring ephemerals and is the bluest of them all.
You can find it in our Wildflower Loop and Ravine Loop, glad it’s one of our hard to miss wildflowers.
I love that it produces pink buds with blue flowers – two colors in one.
But this is just the beginning of the march, from now on. May apples are growing bright green umbrella-shaped leaves from the forest floor and will soon produce large white flowers. The bright yellow trout lily blooms quickly and is named for the spots on its mottled leaves that resemble the backs of trout. And shooting stars, white flowers burning on the forest floor.
Jacob’s Ladder, a complex lilac flower with ladder-shaped leaves. Jack is on the pulpit, across the forest floor, Jack dutifully staying on what looks like his mottled purple pulpit. Solomon’s Seal, named after the biblical king, features delicate bell-shaped flowers suspended from jagged leaves. A springtime beauty, each petal is a tiny white surfboard with a pink racing stripe down the middle.
And that’s just the beginning.
What’s amazing about these plants is the narrow time window in which they slide. The trees in the forest in spring are still leafless, so the sun shines through and caresses the forest floor. Under the warmth of the sun, the long-dormant roots and rhizomes suddenly become active and grow small branches on the ground.
These leaves perform photosynthesis – remember high school biology? — Use sunlight to make sugar and feed starch into rootstocks, making them grow bigger. When those rootstocks are large enough and have resources, the plants burst out into the world with flowers, often brightly colored to dazzle pollinating bees and butterflies.
They also coincidentally dazzle us.
But the flowers are racing against time—and so are the trees. When the trees grow leaves, those leaves block sunlight, creating a parasol in the forest and preventing those flowers from growing. So the flowers have a short period of time to heat up, grow, develop leaves, bloom, pollinate, drop seeds — and then disappear for another year — before the trees drop their leaves.
We’ve missed the earliest flowering plants like bloodroot and skunk cabbage. But every day or week of your visit, new and different flowers will appear.
Stop by our visitor center and pick up a map, then go downhill through Butterfly Meadow, turn left at Ravine Loop and go to Wildflower Loop on Polliwog Pond. You’ll soon find a large field of blue cohosh, opposite a mass of shooting stars, May apples, rue, Dutchman’s breeches, and more all around you.
Follow the back gate of Ravine Loop downhill, then downhill again until it turns off at Smith Run; the best wildflowers are on this stretch of trail that runs parallel to the stream.
On the tour to the left, you pass tall long-leaf skunk cabbages surrounded by tons of mottled trout lily leaves.
Also on the left, here you’ll find the best red trilliums, and soon its close cousin, the white trilliums.
Spring wildflowers are racing through the trees – come and enjoy the race along our canyon loop!
Submitted by Mike Weilbacher, who directs the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education in Roxborough and can be reached at mi**@sc**************.org, who has just written his new book “Wild Philly,” this hike was the second of 25 nature walks. Available at the center gift shop.
