Lifestyles

I know it's only the first week in March, and the only wildflowers even faintly visible are skunk cabbage buds pushing through cold muck along creeks and in wetlands.

Punxsutawney Phil said spring was just around the corner, and I'm thinking ahead to the real wildflowers of spring. So, even though this article is premature, close your eyes and think about a warm spring afternoon and a moist woodland floor covered with wildflowers.

A common spring species that I search for early is Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica). A favorite place to search is Trillium Trail, a woodland park in the heart of Fox Chapel near Pittsburgh.

Usually, I begin my search around mid-April, just when the soil is beginning to warm. Tiny fingers of deep purple-green are the first signs of nascent bluebells. The plants don't remain this dark color all spring, but with the potential for a cold, even sub-freezing, night, the dark color absorbs heat during the day and that, in turn, helps keep the tender plants from freezing.

From those first fingers, bluebells put forth a central stem and leaves expand along that stalk. As the plant gets taller, the dark-purple coloration fades to lime-green. Where there is a large colony of bluebells, the whole sun-drenched woodland floor takes on this beautiful hue. Trillium Trail has a thriving colony visible from the road if you're driving by slowly.

Once bluebell stems reach a foot tall, they begin to arch gracefully. At the end of the stem, pinkish flower buds emerge. If the weather stays mild, buds open and pastel blue tubular flowers, with a widely flared bottom, open. They look like, just as the common name suggests, blue bells.

Finding bluebells in flower assures me that spring is here and here to stay.

The common name bluebell is an accurate description of this native plant. The addition of Virginia comes from the original scientific naming of the species. That was done by Carolus Linnaeus, the famous Swedish botanist. Apparently, some bluebell plants were collected during colonial times, in Virginia, and sent to Linnaeus for examination and naming. This was a common practice as Europeans coming to North America explored the new land. Because the specimens came from colonial Virginia, Linnaeus applied the species name -- virginica. Bluebells are found not only in Virginia, but also grow over much of the eastern United States. They are particularly dense along stream and river floodplains in the Midwest. The Latin genus name Mertensia also was conferred by Linnaeus in honor of a German botanist, Franz Mertens.

By the time Virginia bluebells are fully open, the woods are buzzing with a host of insects. The pendulous nature of the flowers makes it difficult for most pollinating insects to get to the nectar. There is no place for an insect to land and walk around like there is with a trillium or bloodroot that has a flower held upright. What it takes is a creature with a long tongue to land on the outer edge of the flower and then extend a siphon deep in the trumpet-like bloom to reach the nectar. Bluebell pollinators include honey and a variety of long-tongued bees, as well as butterflies, moths and even hummingbirds returning from migration.

Occasionally, bluebells will abandon their name and have pink or even white flowers.

I remember well being on an outing during a botany class at West Virginia University. The instructor was Dr. Earl Core, and he was particularly thrilled when we found white-flowered Virginia bluebells at the arboretum just outside Morgantown. His excitement about those sorts of discoveries, and for the plant world in general, was absolutely infectious, and I'm convinced that his love of flora kindled my own lifelong keenness for things botanical.

After a long and illustrious career at WVU, that same arboretum was named the Core Arboretum in his honor and memory.

If you grow herbs, look carefully at the flowers of bluebells. They are in the Borage family, and there are similarities between this native wildflower and the popular herb of home gardens. Also, bluebells make a wonderful addition to native gardens. They spread quickly and pretty much take care of themselves.

Bluebells would probably be used more as ornamental plants except for their ephemeral nature, something shared by many early spring wildflowers. The dense carpet of plants found in late April and early May are beautiful, but they die back quickly after blooming and are usually completely gone by the end of June. This is the nature of woodland species that take advantage of the short period when the air is warm and there is plenty of sun on the forest floor before the trees come into full leaf. Once the deep shade of late May and June occurs, many of the spring flowers can't photosynthesize enough food to maintain stems and leaves, so they go dormant and wait for next spring.

Some of the other common names for Virginia bluebells are Virginia cowslip, Roanoke bells and lungwort oysterleaf. I've always been interested in how these common names came about, another routine taught to me by Core. In his botanical forays throughout West Virginia, he always made a point of talking with local folks and collecting local plant names and trying to discover how they came about.

The lungwort, of lungwort oysterleaf, comes from the conjecture that eating the leaves from the plant would cure lung ailments. There are a number of plants with the name lungwort, and one native to Europe resembles bluebells. The similarities might have led early settlers to apply the name.

Oysterleaf is simple. It refers to the taste of the leaves when cooked. Roanoke bells may have come about because the plants collected for Linnaeus came from the Roanoke, Va., region, and the name stuck.

Cowslip is a bit harder to understand. The name cowslip is very old and can be found in William Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," where the plant had value for a person's complexion. Cowslip might be a corruption of Cow's Leek, and leek a derivation from an older word simply meaning plant. That still leaves a mystery of where Cow's plant came from in the first place.

However, cowslip in Europe refers to the primrose family, not bluebells. But again, as Europeans colonized the New World, they brought their experiences and knowledge of the Old World with them, and applied it to the new array of plants they encountered. In the 1700s, John Custis, of Williamsburg, Va., described the native bluebells as "Mountain blew cowslip." There is a resemblance to the primroses of England, and this mix of an old name and a new plant might account for cowslip.

Whatever the origin of the name, the bluebells at Trillium Trail in Fox Chapel are one of the many telltale signs I annually search for to assure me that spring is here.

Now you can open your eyes again, it's still March outside, but as Phil predicted, spring is just around the corner.

• Most Read
• Most E-mailed
• Latest News