Mid-Season Potato Dandelions

The container grown Potato Dandelions, Krigia dandelion, are growing so rapidly that their image changes daily.  As long as I employ methods to exclude predators from the container, the plants flourish.  The abundance of leaves provides energy for the production of flowers and underground tubers.  A single plant may produce a dozen or more tubers during the spring growing season.  At this rate of reproduction, it doesn’t take long to build up a large population.

I thought this would be a good time to check on the progress of Potato Dandelion plants growing from tubers planted last fall into this ridgetop site.  This most closely matches the site of the original Blue Jay Barrens population of the rare Potato Dandelion.

A combination of wind and rainfall runoff patterns create patches of bare ground in this area.  Plants growing in these bare spots receive enough sunlight to stimulate production of flowers.

Some of the plants are looking quite healthy.  All of this growth has arisen from a single bean sized tuber.

Other plants have suffered damage from foraging Wild Turkeys.  Turkeys also create patches of bare ground, but at a cost to the plants.

I originally planted some tubers at the base of this cedar.  Turkeys chose this location as a place to take dust baths, and created two large wallows.  What once looked similar to the area in the right foreground, is now devoid of plants.

Potato Dandelions at the original site struggle to put their leaves up through the leaf litter.

The extra effort necessary to push leaves up through the leaf litter is enough to cause these plants to fail to flower.  I will occasionally clear the fallen leaves from a small area and allow the plants to produce flowers.  It’s nice to see the plants bloom, but since the flowers don’t seem to produce any viable seed, the activity give little benefit to the population as a whole.  The non-flowering plants still produce many new tubers, so the population continues to expand.

There may be other populations of the plant at Blue Jay Barrens, but there is only a narrow window in the spring when the plants are easy to see and finding them is complicated by the presence of the White Trout Lily, Erythronium albidum.

White Trout Lily is probably the most abundant woodland spring flower growing in the uplands at Blue Jay Barrens.  The shape and color pattern of the young Trout Lily leaf is remarkably similar to that of the Potato Dandelion.  That’s the Trout Lily on the right.  With hundreds of Trout Lily leaves in view at any one time, it’s easy to see how a random Potato Dandelion leaf could escape notice.

As long as my container grown plants continue to produce plenty of tubers, I will transplant the excess into suitable locations.  It doesn’t look like I’m in danger of having a shortage.

Spring Flowers

Blue Jay Barrens is not the place to be if you want to see masses of spring wildflowers carpeting the woodland floor.  A history of livestock in the woods reduced the wildflower population through trampling and consumption.  The soil was left eroded and compacted which made it hard for the wildflowers to become reestablished.  More recently, deer and turkey have been feeding on many of the wildflowers.  White Trout Lilies are currently the most widely spread species in the woods.  These are growing in an area that was pretty heavily worked over by the turkey flocks.

Spring Beauty is one species that is increasing in number.  It seems to do best along the woodland edges where sunlight is more readily available.

Rue Anemone is common on the lower slopes and floodplains.  This is always one of the earliest species to bloom each year.  The plant moves with the slightest breeze, making it a most frustrating flower to photograph.

Most of the Blue Jay Barrens woodland wildflowers appear later in the spring.  Even when the rest of the State is reporting early blooms, the plants here are slow to awaken.  I’m seeing signs of things to come.  Leaves of the American Columbo are pushing up through the leaves.  Columbo flowers won’t appear until early summer.

Large Flowered Trilliums are rapidly emerging.  The heavy rain that caused the severe flooding earlier in the month also cleared leaf litter from some of the steep hillsides.  These Trilliums are quite conspicuous growing from the bare ground.

It’s neat how this plant emerges as a spike and then unfurls its leaves after it has some height.  This growth pattern is common with many woodland plants that must push through a covering of leaves to reach the light.

One of the first bloomers of the year has already produced fruit.  Two weeks ago, Leavenworthia uniflora was just beginning to bloom.  Now it’s well on its way to producing ripe seed.  Cool weather usually slows the plant’s development so you have a couple of weeks in which to enjoy watching the flowers develop.  Temperatures in the 80’s caused the plants to flower together and push on to fruit development in just a matter of days.  I hope things aren’t going to proceed at such a rapid pace all season.

White Trout Lily

At Blue Jay Barrens, Trout Lilies are the earliest and most conspicuous of the spring woodland flowers. Extremely dry soils, past land abuses and ravenous deer and turkey have all combined to make the spring floral display to be rather under whelming.

The speckled pattern of the leaves makes a rather effective camouflage against the sun dappled woodland floor.

The name Trout Lily is supposed to describe the way the pattern on the leaves resembles the spotted side of a trout. I find that a lot of the leaves look to me as though there is a rip in the fabric of space and time that gives a view of some confused interdimensional vortex. If you stare at the photo, you can see that a leaf shape has been neatly cut from the center and we are looking straight into the Outer Limits.

These are the White Trout Lily, Erythronium albidum. It takes a young Trout Lily many years to mature enough to produce flowers. Populations expand vegetatively and the majority of the plants are single leaved, non-flowering individuals.

One reason I like this plant so much is its association with ants. The Trout Lily seed is attached to a nutritious little fleshy bit that is sought after by ants. The ants carry off the seeds, eat the good part and discard the seed. Through this method, seeds can be spread over quite a large area.