PHOTO POST
Each May I keep watch for my favourite woodland flowers, especially the mysterious Mayapple.
In frequent pilgrimages to the woods, I see Squill showing their colours, and spiders starting the summer with feasts of midges.
Then one day the Mayapples are shooting up out the ground, fully formed.
Within a few days the above-ground part of the plant has unfurled. Those that will blossom and then bear fruit have two leaves and one flower bud, visible as soon as the unfurling begins.
I’m surprised to see a snail has climbed to the top of a Mayapple. But a closer look reveals no one is home in that beautiful shell. The empty shell was simply lifted from its winter resting place as a Mayapple emerged from directly underneath.
Over the next two weeks I visit the woods several times, eager to find the Mayapples in full blossom.
On dewy mornings, short grasses along the way have gone to seed and are happily soaking up moisture.
In the shade near Mayapple patches, Wood Geranium flowers bloom in shafts of sunlight that streak through the spotty springtime forest canopy.
A small branch at my feet, long since fallen away from a tree, is growing beautiful arcs of fungi.
At last, when I get down low and gaze through the dim light near the forest floor, I see white flowers.
Beneath the tall tree trunks are Mayapple leaves, beneath those are Mayapple blossoms, a few inches lower are Trillium blooms, lower still are Trillium leaves, and lower still, you’re getting close to the forest floor.
When you get close enough to a Mayapple blossom you are treated to a strangely rich scent, a foretaste of the delicious fruit that will soon form. If you’re lucky, the squirrels might leave one or two ripe fruits for you to taste in late July or early August. (You don’t want to cheat by grabbing an unripe fruit, which is poisonous along with all other parts of the Mayapple plant.) And if you don’t manage to sample the fruit, just getting a sniff of the flower is a worthy consolation prize.