Last weekend I visited the Paskamansett Woods in Dartmouth. The trail takes you to and across the Paskamansett River. The low lying area adjacent to the river (i.e., the floodplain), was dotted with new bright green growth. None of our native plants typically leaf out this early, so I wandered in to take a closer look. It turned out that these were the new leaves from Lesser Celandine (Ficaria verna), also known as fig buttercup. Lesser Celandine is a low…
Spring ephemerals always bring a smile to my face. These hardy little herbaceous perennials poke their heads up from the soil in early-spring before the leaves have emerged from the canopy trees above them. On Cape Cod, we have Canada mayflower and starflower. Elsewhere in the state where the soil is richer, bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) is just starting to flower right now. Found in every county in Massachusetts except for Barnstable, Dukes and Nantucket counties, bloodroot is so named for…
Wood anemones (Anemone quinquefolia) are low-growing delicate perennial herbaceous plants with three leaves arranged in a whorl below a solitary five-petaled white or pinkish flower. The leaves are actually divided into three parts, but with the deeply lobed lateral leaflets, it often appears as though there are five distinct leaflets. In fact, the appearance of five separate leaflets is sometimes so pronounced that when Carl Linnaeus named Anemone quinquefolia in 1753, he described the plant as having leaves with five…