The curtains are rising to a free colorful show in local woodlands — and the pageantry won’t last long.
Call it the spring ephemeral wildflower show. Native plants are emerging from the soil in the woods, and will bloom one after the other in hues of white, yellow, purple, blue, red and violet before the canopy of trees fills out and robs the plants of the sun needed to thrive above ground.
By early summer, most have vanished, hiding beneath the soil and developing buds for next spring’s show.
“I love to take spring wildflower walks” said Grayslake resident Sandy Miller, president of the Lake-to-Prairie chapter of the Wild Ones. “Every day you go out there and there is something new that’s coming up. One day there will be Virginia waterleaf. The next time you go out, the trilliums will be popping up, or the trout lilies.
“I love Reed-Turner Woodland (Preserve) in Long Grove because it’s so varied. You’re not walking on a flat surface. You’re going up and down in a ravine and over the creek. The first thing I often see in spring is the Virginia waterleaf. A couple weeks after that, the place is covered with all kinds of flowers — Virginia bluebells, May apples, jack-in-the-pulpit. It’s such a varied landscape. You’ll see everything there.”
The diversity of native wildflowers is important on the forest floor in spring, Miller said.
“If we don’t have the native flowers growing, then we don’t have native birds and insects and other animals,” she said.
Star of the show
One special visit Miller makes every spring is to Captain Daniel Wright Woods near Vernon Hills to see the great white trillium. Miller usually goes in early to mid-May.
“It is a sea, a sea of great white trillium,” she said. “I have never seen so many in my life. Each time I go, I’m awestruck.”
Mark Baldwin drives from Bolingbrook to Wright Woods to photograph the trillium.
“You really don’t find the stand of trillium anywhere else like you do there,” he said.
The great white trillium has not always been that prolific at Wright Woods, said Tom Smith, stewardship coordinator for the Lake County Forest Preserves.
Several decades ago, much of the great white trillium was disappearing in forest preserves, including at Wright Woods and Ryerson Conservation Area near Riverwoods because too many deer were munching on the wildflowers, Smith said. A deer culling program, which includes meat given to the needy, has helped bring the spring wildflowers back to local woodlands.
“It took 20 years before the trillium started to really come back, as well as other wildflowers,” he said. “The white trillium is an indicator species for the deer program because deer like the trillium like candy.”
Protecting wildflowers
Smith said volunteers, including from corporations, help remove two non-native species that crowd the wildflowers — garlic mustard and buckthorn.
“Garlic mustard is everywhere and we attack it in remnant woodlands,” Smith said. “Garlic mustard is what’s called alleopathic. Where it grows, it won’t let other seeds germinate around it. Garlic mustard creates a monoculture. Deer don’t eat it, and no native insect attacks it. Where we might have at least a dozen species in a square meter, when garlic mustard takes over, there’s only one species left.”
Volunteers are out now pulling garlic before it goes to seed and spreads like wildfire, he said.
Smith, of Winthrop Harbor, said great white trillium also grows at Beulah Park in Zion, one of his favorite spring wildflower spots.
“The Lake County Stormwater Management Commission did a super big project there. They cleared out the dead wood and fallen trees and it’s much more open and more wildflower-friendly now,” Smith said. “There’s more light in there.”
And more light means a bigger, more colorful show for people like Smith who love this time of year to see native wildflowers blooming.
Sheryl DeVore is a freelancer for the News-Sun
