Some accident of placement or ancestry, of light and moisture, had singled out this one to bloom today. Nearby, the other trout lilies were still asleep on pink stems, their buds drooping.

When a trout lily opens, its petals flare out, a skirt in twirl. The open blossom lets rain slide off, protecting nectar and pollen from being washed away.

What we usually see is the underside of the petals. The flower turns its face to the ground.

To see its full beauty, to look it in the eye, I lie down on the ground, cheek against the moist earth. I’m within arm’s reach of the flower, close as lovers sharing a pillow.

From below, I see the structure of the flower. The anthers hang beneath the petals, and the center is a sheltered space that holds the nectar.

A bee who has just emerged from its underground winter burrow arrives hungry. It wants that nectar. Some native bees specialize in early spring flowers like this one, particularly mining bees (Andrena). Each female must feed herself, dig a burrow, lay eggs, and provision the nest. And she must do this quickly, while the flowers last.

Her time in the sun is typically a month or less. It matches the time in which trout lilies bloom.

A mining bee approaches from below, lands, and then gropes up into the flower. Reaching for nectar, the bee’s body brushes the anthers and picks up some pollen. On the next visit to a trout lily, some pollen is left behind. Flower and pollinator fulfill their contract.

A single plant has one stem. If it flowers, there is one flower. If pollinated, it makes one seed pod, holding about 10-30 seeds.

When the pod ripens and releases the seeds, ants carry them off and leave them to sprout in new places. In the following season, each germinating seed makes a single, small leaf, but no flower. Although they may be growing close together, each leaf in a colony of young trout lilies is a separate plant.

The trout lily spends its early years gathering energy from the sun. Each spring it sends up a single leaf and stores what it gains in a small, bulb-like, underground structure called a corm. When the leaf dies, the corm remains, hidden below ground, until the following spring.

Over the years, it expands its reserves. At about age five, it may produce two leaves. The next year, at last, it might put out a single flower.

Within a day of opening, the petals begin to curl upward, sometimes nearly meeting above.

Even after reaching maturity, a plant may not bloom every year. Sometimes it spends a season building its reserves again, sending up leaves but no flower.

Clusters of trout lilies may be decades or even centuries old. They are evidence of a forest long undisturbed.

Tall thimbleweed (Anemone virginiana)!

I had never found it in my woods before. Looking around, I saw others along the trail. Most didn’t have flowers yet, but even at a distance I recognized the leaves.

They were the greenest of green, big, and deeply divided, with veins keenly delineated, as if cut by a sculptor’s chisel.

Not lavish, the plants bore only a few blossoms, each one solitary at the end of its stalk. The small white buds were delicate against the rough brocade of the forest.

Open flowers have what look like five white petals. But thimbleweed has no true petals. Instead, the showy white parts are sepals, the outer layer of the bud, usually hidden beneath the petals, but here replacing the petals entirely.

At the center of an open blossom, a small globe is already swelling. After the flower fades, the globe elongates into the form of a thimble.

Ah, thimbleweed!

I walked the trail every day, checking on them as the seedheads matured, grew longer, and changed from green to brown.

By fall, it seemed as if stuffing was leaking out of the thimbles, like a worn-out down jacket.

I picked one for my microscope. I knew there had to be seeds in there, but I couldn’t quite see them, because they were enveloped in fibers that were dense, silky, and soft as angora.

Stiff little tails stuck out of the fur. These were the dried remnants of the flowering parts. I pinched one with my ultra-sharp tweezers and tugged. Out came an achene, a tiny fruit containing a single seed.

I could not pull the fur away. It is part of the achene itself, a growth of its surface. The hairs catch air currents, which carry the achene and seed away from the parent plant. They don’t all disperse at once. The wind tickles them out a few at a time throughout the winter.

That tail-like style is strategic too. It can catch on passing animals, hitching a ride. It may also help orient the achene as it settles into soil.

I managed to separate out a few seeds, each wrapped in its luxuriant boa, and planted them in small pots.

When they were big enough, I moved them to permanent homes. I enclosed them in wire cages, because I’ve seen seedlings of this species grazed to the ground by rabbits or deer.

I tucked a few under the partial shade of an elderberry bush. They didn’t bloom the first year. Like most perennials they needed a year to establish their roots.

I don’t know why I didn’t find the thimbleweeds until I had lived here twenty years. Perhaps they have always grown here, unnoticed. Or perhaps they are recent arrivals, moving quietly into the understory as the world changes and their needs are met in ways I cannot fathom.

Now tall thimbleweed has a home in the garden near my front door. As spring arrives I’m already watching for it to emerge.

One April day few years ago, I was down by Crow Creek with my binoculars, and I saw a new blue on the cliff across the water. A blue whose exact shade I didn’t recognize. A new wildflower.

How I wished I could transport myself over there and get a close look. But there was no way. The creek was close to flooding. Even if I could wade across, the vertical bank was a wall of moss and ferns, rising higher than the tallest oaks. Impossible to scale.

The next day I found a plant on my side of the creek. It was small, with only a few flowering stems. Its blue was pale and unique. The leaves were in matched pairs on either side of the stem, as if reflected right to left.

It was Jacob’s Ladder, and it was new to me.

I loved the little blue flower on sight.

Would it grow in my shady flower garden? I started visiting the plant almost every day, watching for the seeds. After the blossoms faded and the petals fell, the calyxes looked like miniature paper lanterns. Inside each lantern were several seeds, still green and not ready to be collected.

I enclosed one of the clusters in an organza drawstring bag while the seeds ripened. Good thing I did. One day I found the seeds had already scattered, but my bag had saved some for me. Those seeds founded the Jacob’s Ladders in my garden that I’ve enjoyed ever since.

Jacob in the woods

Jacob’s Ladder is a native plant of eastern North America woodlands. It flowers in early spring, taking advantage of the strengthening sun before the trees leaf out and claim all the light.

Jacob in the garden

Unlike many spring-blooming wildflowers, Jacob’s Ladder’s leaves stay green all summer, given enough water. It’s wonderful for a shady garden, because it doesn’t leave a gap when the flowers are finished.

Who doesn’t like it?

Mammals. Many treasured native plants have fared ill at the teeth of deer and rabbits. Not Jacob’s Ladder. While there is no guarantee that any plant is immune, Jacob’s Ladder is still standing on mornings when other garden plants have been grazed to the ground.

Who does like it?

Bees of many kinds visit when the Jacob’s Ladder is bloom, including bumblebees. A native bee, Andrena polemonii, specializes in flowers of this genus (Polemonium). If you grow Jacob’s Ladder, you could be doing your bit to preserve biodiversity by feeding a bee that depends on a small number of closely related plants.

What does Jacob like?

If Jacob gets these three things that it loves, it’s a wonderful garden flower.

• Protection from weeds. Jacob’s Ladder appreciates having the weeds cleared around it. It’s not aggressive, and it shrinks from competition.

• Water. With sufficient water, the leaves stay green all summer and into the fall.

• Shade. Jacob’s Ladder thrives in partial shade from mid spring through summer.

It’s easy to grow, starting with seeds. Once established, a colony will slowly expand. Collect some seeds, and you can bestow Jacob’s Ladder on your friends.

Whence the name?

In 1597, John Gerard, a London barber-surgeon and garden superintendent, published a massive book that was rather like a modern field guide: Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes. One plant he named Jacob’s Ladder (Polemonium caeruleum), because its paired leaves looked like a ladder and put him in mind of the Genesis story of Jacob climbing a ladder to heaven.

He described the leaves: “leaues set vpon a middle rib one against another…paired leaflets along the rachis… like the rounds of a ladder.”

When the closely related American version of the plant (Polemonium reptans) was discovered and classified a century and a half later, the name Jacob’s Ladder was applied to it.

I find myself addressing the plant simply as Jacob.

The plant was perfect. Each umbel, or cluster of blossoms, was a bouquet of flowers, each intricate as a ballroom gown from the Palace of Versailles.

A Giant Swallowtail flapped past my face and landed on a pink umbel. It settled lightly, half floating above the flowers, using its feet delicately for balance, wings stroking slowly.

It inserted its proboscis into one small individual flower after another, drawing up nectar. Swamp Milkweed is generous.

After a few minutes, the swallowtail moved on, and several honeybees arrived right away, as if they’d been awaiting their turn.

They hurried from flower to flower in the umbel. They seemed a little clumsy after the grace of the swallowtail.

Maybe it was because their legs were ensnared.

Swamp Milkweed is all enticement. With color and a honey-vanilla scent, it coaxes insects to approach. Visitors win a lavish reward of nectar.

But there is a catch.

Each individual flower is a tiny trap. As a bee sips nectar, it gropes with its feet for purchase, and its legs keep slipping down inside the blossoms. Sometimes a foot gets caught.

I’ve watched honeybees struggle to keep their balance while trying to wrench a foot out of a milkweed flower. When the foot finally gets loose, it’s likely to be carrying some extra weight, which looks like dangling golden trinkets.

These “trinkets” are the milkweed’s pollen. Uniquely configured, the pollen packets are hidden in tight slits within the flowers. A bee’s leg slips into a slit. A pair of pollen packets gets snagged on the fine hairs of the struggling insect and is dragged out on the leg.

This is the strategy by which milkweeds are pollinated.

The bee gets loose and flies off. It may then visit another Swamp Milkweed, and the same leg may get caught again in the next flower. Only if the pollen packet comes loose inside a flower on a different plant is pollination accomplished.

The result will be a pod full of milkweed seeds.

Each pod forms where a pollen packet finds its mark.

In every pod, about 200 seeds are forming. At one end, each seed has a silky coma, a white parachute that is carried on the wind. And the seed is on its way to becoming a new Swamp Milkweed.

This is a dainty milkweed, reaching only shin high. When we first met, one August in a wildflower-filled Iowa prairie, I could have walked right past without seeing it. But a Monarch butterfly caught my attention and made me bend over for a closer look.

There are many species of native milkweeds. Most are fairly large plants, with colorful blossoms. Whorled Milkweed (Asclepias verticillata) is the smallest of our local milkweeds, and its flowers are white. Its leaves are unusual for milkweeds, too — long, skinny “pine needles.”

The tiny individual flowers are intricate, like miniature carved ivory. I needed a closer look.

I took a blossom home to my microscope. Under the lens I could see the elaborate architecture of the flower.

Five pale green petals swoop downward like wings. The top of the flower has five tiny white cups (called hoods). From the hoods arise five curved white spurs (called horns) that point upward and inward.

These horns are not sharp and won’t poke your finger. However, they’re firm enough to guide visiting insects so that they pollinate the flower effectively.

In addition to butterflies, many kinds of very small native bees, small wasps, and ants visit this milkweed for its nectar. And because it blooms late, it provides a reliable food source when other milkweeds have finished blooming. All nectar seekers are invited.

Monarch butterflies are considered to be vulnerable to extinction, in significant part because of the declining amount of milkweed, which is the only food their caterpillars can eat. Many gardeners and land managers make a big point of growing milkweeds to support Monarchs. At the same time they’re helping other less famous butterflies and moths, all of which are important parts of the natural food web.

One of my goals is to have all the locally native milkweed species growing on my property.

My new Whorled Milkweeds won’t flower this year, instead putting their energy into establishing a deep, perennial root system. They will make at least a few blossoms in the second year of life. In following years they will bloom more abundantly.

There’ll be a white breath in the prairie.

The bergamot is dry and brittle. The goldfinches are drab now, too. On their throats, the males have only a trace of the shining gold their bodies wore last summer.

On this gray January day, the Wild Bergamot is still giving.

Winter

I always leave the flower stalks standing in my Iowa backyard. Dozens — sometimes hundreds — of goldfinches winter over. They need the seeds as food to get them through the months when nothing grows.

Watching goldfinches is nourishing to my wintering human soul.

Spring

Wild Bergamot (Monarda fistulosa) is a mint. Like most mints, its leaves are studded with oil glands housed in tiny hairs that stick out from the leaf surface. Merely touching fresh leaves releases a cooling aroma — something like camphor, but softer.

The scent delights me. It is not, however, a favorite of deer and rabbits, which is why mints enjoy some degree of protection from getting munched.

In mid-spring, especially on sunny days, I find myself brushing my fingertips over newly emerging bergamot leaves, just to experience the clear, delicate scent. It feels like a promise. Flowers coming soon.

Summer

In summer, Wild Bergamot blooms for a month or two. It offers a particularly sweet and sustained feast for pollinators.

As butterflies and bees slurp up the nectar, each blossom replenishes its supply within a few hours. Therefore, unlike some plants that give nectar only during certain times, these flowers are open for business all day long.

Some of our most dramatic butterflies seek out Wild Bergamot. The large flower heads make easy landing platforms, and the tubular blossoms are a good fit for a butterfly’s long proboscis. Swallowtails, monarchs, skippers, fritillaries, painted ladies, and sulphurs all favor this plant.

In Midwestern prairie remnants and restorations, Wild Bergamot is often cited as a keystone nectar source for native bees.

It blooms at a perilous season, in mid to late summer. Spring flowers are long gone. Goldenrods and asters aren’t open yet. Many native bees are seeking pollen for their nests. At precisely that moment, this wildly generous flower steps up to save the day. Without Wild Bergamot, there would be little else to fulfill its role.

Fall

Eventually, the flowers are all pollinated. Petals fall away from ripening seed heads. The glorious colors are gone. But gardeners who love wildlife often leave their spent plants standing, because they still have value for wild creatures.

In my garden last September, a hummingbird perched on the dried Wild Bergamot, as if pondering whether to return to the feeder or snatch a gnat from the air. He came back to the same seedhead day after day.

Maybe the delicate texture of the seed head felt just right on the toes. I was delighted to preserve it for him.

It soothes my soul to know that birds and other wild creatures find their needs met in my backyard.

I fill my spot on this planet with native plants that support the world that supports us.

This much I can do.

The foliage — thick like a succulent — is more luxuriant than the flowers. The leaves form a tight, vividly green whorl that looks almost like a flower itself.

I like the green leaves. Rabbits and deer, on the other hand, do not. The leaves are tough and bitter, with low sugar content. If a mammal does nibble Cream Gentian, it seldom takes a second bite. The gentian plant usually survives.

Cream Gentian flowers are white, with subtle greenish stripes. To our human eyes, the stripes are faint, almost invisible. To bees, who easily perceive ultraviolet light, the stripes may serve as conspicuous visual guides pointing toward the nectar at the flower’s center.

Even when the flower is ready to be pollinated — a stage when many flowers spread their petals — Cream Gentian maintains its bud shape. The five petals come loosely together, like fingers and thumb when we pick up cookie crumbs from a plate. A bumblebee can get through the opening, but it’s a snug fit, causing the bee to press against the flower’s anthers and stigma. When it backs out again, well smeared with pollen, it is primed to pollinate the next gentian it visits.

Cream Gentian came to my garden thanks to my friend Moni. She discovered a patch of them growing wild in her grassy field, which for decades had been pasture. The gentians may have been growing in that spot for thousands of years, since the end of the last Ice Age. Moni invited me to dig a couple of plants that were growing into her trail, where they were getting stepped on. I took them home to my small prairie garden.

The next year, in August and September, they bloomed. The display lasted for over a month. Even when the plant turned to creating seeds, the white petals did not fall. Instead, they lost their luster and turned into what looked like floppy paper wrappers. They didn’t look as if they had anything inside.

By squeezing, I felt concealed pods, the size of a vitamin capsule. I shucked off the papery exterior and took one of them to my microscope. The pod was splitting, revealing many tiny seeds inside. The slightly opened end of the pod curled back like the lips of a grinning imp.

At a touch, tiny wafers floated out almost weightlessly. The seeds looked like creamy rice paper with a darker center embedded within it. That dark area is the embryo, the living part of the seed.

Nature scatters the insubstantial seeds with the assistance of wind. Sometimes she uses a gardener to help her spread them to a new area and begin a new patch of Cream Gentians. I do some of that work every year.

I like being taken advantage of that way by nature.

Cream Gentian (Gentiana alba), is a native North American wildflower of tallgrass prairies, savannas, and open woodland edges. Its presence often indicates high-quality prairie remnants and lightly managed natural landscapes.

Scientific name: Gentiana alba
Common names: Cream Gentian, Yellow Gentian
Plant family: Gentian family (Gentianaceae)

It is not fussy about soil. It likes full sun but can take a little shade. It grows about three feet tall and blooms in late summer. It’s a good garden plant.

It is found along a broad band through the middle of the Midwest, with scattered locations farther east.

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It was the biggest elm around here, and we watched it with something close to reverence. You could see it from far down the road. It said to us, “almost home.” But when the bark started to bleed in wide white streaks down the trunk, we knew it was dying of Dutch elm disease.

It did not expire immediately. The crown gradually became more sparse, but the old tree kept putting out green leaves for another five years.

In late winter of 2019, the white steaks covered half the trunk. Yet in April, leaves appeared again.

OK, maybe it has this one last year, I thought.

However, at the height of spring that year, suddenly the tree could no longer conduct water from root to foliage. In a single day all the leaves wilted. By summer, the branches were bare as winter.

We called expert arborist Eli Morgan. With the respectful skill of a surgeon, he removed all limbs that extended over the road. At our request, he left standing everything that was not a danger to life or vehicle. For woodpeckers.

For the elm’s life after death.

Over the next few years, the bark sloughed off in huge slabs still shaped by the curve of the trunk.

Dead elm creates new life

Woodpeckers need dead and dying trees. That’s why we left the elm standing.

A pair of Red-headed Woodpeckers came and hammered holes and excavated nesting cavities. In a high trunk, male and female took turns incubating the eggs. I knew the eggs had hatched when both parents started bringing food to the baby woodpeckers every few minutes.

If the inner walls of a cavity stay firm, Red-headed Woodpeckers use the nest hole for another brood. But if the wood gets soft or soggy, they abandon it and start over.

Old cavities are hot property for other hole-nesting birds who cannot excavate on their own.

Last summer, several times I saw a Great Crested Flycatcher loitering in a shingle oak next to the elm snag, as if surveying it. A big dead tree out in the open like this is an ideal nesting site for this species.

Great Crested Flycatchers nest only in holes, for which they are utterly dependent on woodpeckers.

Bluebirds, chickadees, nuthatches, and titmice also repurpose old woodpecker holes for nesting.

Although chickadees can’t peck a new hole, they can sometimes enlarge an existing one if the wood is rotting and soft.

One morning I heard a hollow tapping from inside a stub of trunk.

As I searched for the source of the sound, a Black-capped Chickadee popped its head out of a hole, its beak full of sawdust. Bill opened. Sawdust blew away on the breeze. The chickadee’s head disappeared back down into the hole. And the tapping began again.

Fungus among us

Meanwhile, other life forms found a home in the death of the tree.

At the height of my head, Golden Oyster Mushrooms sprang from the elm’s collapsing bark. After the mushrooms turned brown, a House Wren discovered they made a fine platform on which to sunbathe.

Many species of birds hang out in the bare top branches, which offer a commanding view for miles around. Year around, crows perch there and caw at me when I drive past the tree. In late summer Turkey Vultures took over the top branches. Once a Bald Eagle perched there.

Dutch elm disease

The malady is caused by a fungus, carried by bark beetles. The beetles and fungus arrived in the United States in the last century on logs imported from Europe. American Elms did not evolve in proximity to the disease, and so they have no defense against it.

It is now so pervasive that almost all American Elms get it, and nearly all will die of it. However, young trees don’t get Dutch elm disease until their bark begins to furrow, at about 15-25 years old. Many live long enough to flower and make seeds. The species will not be wiped out.

But American Elms will no longer grow old. If not for the disease, our elm could easily have lived another 200 years. The opportunity to look up into such a patriarch elm’s branches will probably never come again.

While I mourn the loss of this great tree, I still watch it and celebrate its myriad signs of life.

I first saw it blooming in a ragged patch 3 to 10 feet wide and not half the length of a regular back yard. A nothing-looking scrap of land, it was not planted, not watered or tended, not landscaped or even fenced. But a few native plants grew there, remnants of the tallgrass prairie that once filled this part of Iowa like a green ocean. And they were glorious.

Wild Quinine was in bloom, its flowers like miniature heads of cauliflower. Rough Blazing Star shot up tall as the clumps of Little Bluestem. Butterfly Milkweed had finished blooming and was opening its seed pods.

I had never seen Smooth Blue Aster before. Looking closely at the golden central disk, I saw how it was composed of tiny flowers (florets).

At the tip of each floret was pollen for the taking. And deep in the center of the floret, the aster offered sweet nectar, ready to be slurped up through an insect’s proboscis. Every plant had at least one butterfly or bee on it.

I rubbed my thumb over a leaf. Most asters have rough, raspy-textured leaves. This one was pliant, like warm, oiled skin. Smooth. For those leaves, the flower is called Smooth Blue Aster.

Why are Smooth Blue Asters still here?

The railroad first steamed through Fairfield in about 1858. Before then, the plow had barely touched the soil of southern Iowa. Over 300 species of wildflowers and grasses thronged the prairie and clothed most of the state. It must have been quite the view out the window for train passengers.

During the next 40 years, the view changed to agricultural fields, cities, and roads. Cereal crops became abundant, but wildflowers almost entirely disappeared. Even savannah areas, where prairie once thrived between sparse trees, turned into solid forest, thanks to the suppression of fire. Almost every speck of prairie disappeared by 1900.

What remained were small and isolated patches where the plow never reached. The wildflowers held on in old cemeteries, roadside ridges that were too hard to plow, steep and rocky slopes, and odd corners of farms.

Railroad rights-of-way are and always have been about 100 feet wide. The tracks usually run down the middle. On each outer side of the tracks, about 40 feet is kept clear.

Along most of the right-of-way, the native soil has been cut into, graded, scraped, ditched, sprayed with herbicides, or smothered with railroad rock.

However, a few spots escaped. Some were just beyond the reach of where rock was dumped. Others were too steep for equipment or lay in awkward corners. In those places of lucky neglect, prairie plants have survived.

We call these places prairie remnants, and they are irreplaceable. They take up less than a tenth of one percent of all the land in the original Iowa prairie.

In a prairie remnant like that, where train tracks keep a channel open to the sky, I came upon Smooth Blue Aster on a September day. The plant has lived right there in very spot for thousands of years, blooming, going to seed, creating itself again and again.

I love it all the more for surviving on its own, with no help from people or gardeners or garden centers. Just a native American citizen of the ancient prairie that has been here longer than any of us, or even our ancestors.

That may have been the moment I lost my heart to the virgin prairie.

Not that I could move it. Its roots reach 5 to 8 feet down into the earth by now.

It’s a Gray-headed Coneflower. It came about six years ago, as a seed blown in from the wild. These wildflowers were already in the area when I arrived, some twenty years ago. They’ve been here much longer. They were blooming when Iowa was native prairie and the bison owned it.

I’ve gotten to know this individual plant personally. I catch myself saying, “Hi, Yellow,” when I see it, as if it had a self of its own.

The American Goldfinches know Yellow too. They come close to my window to visit. I’m struck by how the bird and flower colors match.

The coneflower’s petals are yellow because they contain carotenoid pigments, and in particular one called lutein. That chemical is especially concentrated in the fuzzy covering of the flower’s central dome. The fuzz is composed of microscopic flowers (“disk florets”) that open sequentially, from bottom to top.

They are jam-packed with lutein, and that is what the goldfinches are after.

Pigment bounty

Goldfinches need lutein because it's the chemical that makes their feathers yellow. However, birds can’t make their own carotenoid pigments. They have to eat plants that contain them. Then the pigments get processed by the liver and go to the feathers, turning them yellow.

No wonder goldfinches are keen to patronize yellow flowers. The birds are picking up their colors.

Seed bounty

After the petals drop and the seeds develop, the lutein content fades away. Still the goldfinches keep coming to the coneflowers, but now it’s for something else. Ripe seeds are full of yummy fats — fuel for surviving the winter.

When the seeds ripen inside the dome, the birds can remove them like kernels off an ear of corn. They are tiny, only 1/16 inch long, but nutritious and worth a goldfinch’s effort.

The seeds ripen slowly, daily getting easier to pluck out. The birds visit a lot. They are used to me looking at them.

Tribe

We’re a sort of mixed tribe, the birds and the Gray-headed Coneflower and I, on both sides of the window glass. A little group of friends.

By garden design standards, the Gray-headed Coneflower may be out of place. But it came of its own will, and it has its own life. It’s part of my life too, and that of the goldfinches. It will be here long after I’m gone.

Yellow stays.

Down in the heart of each flower, the petals narrow and form a well. Inside, a drop of nectar pools. It is ready for a visitor, someone whose flight is powered by sugar, someone who will pollinate the blossom.

Usually it’s a bumblebee who comes. It lands on the ruffled platform of the lower petal and pushes its head into the flower, probing for sweetness with its tongue.

Blue Sage devotes itself to bumblebees, who fit the flowers like key in lock. While the bee feeds on nectar, the flower executes a precision maneuver to deliver pollen smack onto the bee’s head.

Two pollen sacs hide inside the flower’s upper petal. The petal is curled almost into a tube, with a slit opening on the underside.

Delivering pollen

While the bee probes the flower, the two pollen sacs suddenly descend. The pollen sacs are concave, curved to fit the bumblebee’s head. They stamp the pollen onto the bee.

I’d read that the bee’s tongue presses against levers that swing the pollen sacs down. Now normally the pollen sacs are concealed inside the curled upper petal. Even when they swing into action, the bee’s head is in the way and prevents a view.

I wanted to see it work. I took a needle-thin piece of a grass stem and poked it gently into a blossom. My hands felt huge and clumsy, but I tried to do it delicately, as if the stem were the tongue of a bee.

Video through my microscope: a Blue Sage blossom is triggered to lower its pollen sacs

To my astonishment, I watched the two pollen sacs pivot down. A bee would certainly have gotten its head stamped with pollen.

If you have Blue Sage in your garden, you can try this yourself. In the throat of the flower, you will see two pale bumps. Each bump is the other end of the lever that connects to a pollen sac. Press the bump with a thin instrument, like a grass stem or a pencil lead.

The other half of pollination

By the time the blossom has been visited a few times by bumblebees, it has given up its pollen. The anthers shrivel. That blossom is finished donating pollen.

Besides the pollen sacs, there is also a sort of pale fishhook that emerges from the upper petal. It is split in two parts. One curves up and the other points downward, toward where the bee’s head will be. This two-part structure is the stigma, the female part of the flower. After the pollen stage is over, the stigma matures. The tip of the lower branch becomes ready to receive pollen.

A bee that already has pollen on its head bumps into the stigma when it visits the flower. Pollen transfers from bee head to stigma, and pollination is achieved.

Other visitors

Although Blue Sage is engineered for bumblebees, butterflies and occasionally even hummingbirds visit it as well. Everybody loves nectar.

Butterflies and birds are not efficient pollinators for this native wildflower. For them, Blue Sage is purely a gift. Gift to the butterfly, gift to the hummingbird, and of course a gift to the gardener.

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Most adult males have already migrated out of Iowa. Females and the young of the year linger a while longer. They zip around seeking flower sugar, which they will put away in the form of hummingbird fat. They must store calories to power their long migratory flight south, right across the Gulf of Mexico and on into Central America.

In bloom, Rough Blazing Star is a pole of purple. Its flowers are clustered into what look like tufted buttons along its length. A “button” could be mistaken for an individual flower, but it’s really a little bouquet, a composite of dozens of tiny flowers — florets — bound together at their bases.

Each floret will develop a seed. But first it must get pollinated. It offers a tiny gift of nectar to potential pollinators. Bees and butterflies are always working the flowers. A bumblebee laps up nectar with its long, hairy tongue. A butterfly unfurls its proboscis, probes the flower, and sucks up sweetness. In the process, the flower is pollinated.

In late summer, when many of hummers’ mainstay flowers are past (such as Cardinal Flower and Wild Bergamot), hummingbirds also attend Rough Blazing Star. A hovering hummingbird reaches into the bottom of each flower with her tongue, which she can stick out twice the length of her bill.

It’s hard to see it, because the tongue as thin as a human hair. It moves accurately and faster than our eyes can follow. She flicks it into hundreds of tiny florets, winning a microscopic bit of nectar with each thrust.

I try to imagine what the small bird sees, with her close view of the miniature blossoms. Just like many garden flowers, each floret has five out-flaring petals. They join in a tube, at the bottom of which the nectar pools.

From each floret, a long purple thread emerges. As it lengthens, it splits in two and waves in the air as if searching. Searching for pollen. The double thread is the style, the floret’s female structure. The tips are sticky, and they hold onto any pollen that touches them. The pollen comes to them on the bodies of the insects and hummingbirds who feed at the blossoms.

Blooming late in the flowering season, Rough Blazing Star is ready right when hummingbirds are migrating through the Midwest and their energy need is great.

They also bring their sweetness to my garden at the time when many flowers have stopped blooming.

Our own hibiscus is closer to the size of teacup saucers than dinner plates, but it’s as pretty as any hibiscus I’ve ever seen. It naturally grows wild in the muddy banks of streams and rivers, where many butterflies and bees feed on its pollen and nectar. It also does well in gardens, if provided with plenty of water.

Its own bee!

Our own hibiscus has its own bee, the Hibiscus Turret Bee, which dedicates itself to hibiscus flowers.

The female Hibiscus Turret Bee goes down into the heart of the flower, where she sort of thrashes around collecting pollen on her legs and body.

The pollen she collects is what she feeds to her babies. After digging a hole in damp soil, she lays an egg (or sometimes two), and leaves a ball of pollen inside for the larva to eat when it hatches from the egg. That pollen comes exclusively and always from hibiscus.

Why she loves hibiscus

The pollen grains of Hibiscus flowers are about 0.005 inch in diameter, which is slightly greater than the width of a coarse human hair. That’s pretty big, as pollens go. Thus it’s highly rewarding to a mother bee gathering food for her young.

If you click the closeup above to enlarge it, you may see tiny spines radiating from each whitish pollen grain. Those spines help the pollen stick to the bee’s hairs so that she can carry the pollen to her nest.

Recipe for a pollen grain

Pollen of different species vary in their mix of nutrients. Larva of Hibiscus Turret Bees are perfectly adapted to the amino acids and the protein–lipid balance of hibiscus pollen. Pollen of other flowers would not allow the larvae to develop normally into healthy bees. So the females don’t bother with pollen from any other flowers.

To find a female

If a female’s guiding passion is finding pollen for her nests, the male’s passion is finding females. And what better place to find one than in a hibiscus flower?

A male lives entirely on nectar. Since he is not provisioning larvae, he doesn’t need pollen. He can drink his lunch from flowers other than hibiscus. However, he hangs out down in a hibiscus blossom because that’s where he can meet females.

Where he sleeps

Hibiscus flowers bloom only for one day, opening in the morning and closing before dark. In the afternoon, as petals wilt and begin to close up, the male bee hunkers down inside a flower, completely enclosed.

It’s a safe place to spend the night, protected from weather and predators. And in the morning, he’s already right there on the hibiscus plant, ready to welcome female visitors.

I peeled back a a couple of wilted petals early the other morning and was startled to see a Hibiscus Turret Bee looking up at me. He was probably not quite ready to emerge from his pink blankets, but he crept out and let me get a pretty good look at him before he flew away. I suspect he was the same individual that I found several times that day among the newly opening flowers.

Only males roost in the blossoms, by the way. Females spend the night in one of their underground burrows.

Big bold hibiscus

Although the flowers of our native Halberd-leaf Rose Mallow are smaller than the exuberant and often exotic hibiscus grown by gardeners, I treasure it. It has come down through the ages, since before we were here with our notes and names. It is Iowa’s own hibiscus, and it is home to its special bee.

Halberd-leaf Hibiscus has been in my garden for three years. I’ve always been hoping to find a Hibiscus Turret Bee among its flowers. I had little expectation of success, because the bee is very rare in Iowa. It was first found in the state only in 2022, by students at Luther College.

When I found one last weekend, I could hardly believe my eyes. But I sent my photo to BugGuide, a repository of insect records for North America. The experts there confirmed it as Hibiscus Turret Bee, Ptilothrix bombiformis.

I had a big grin on my face all day.

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I found it in a natural opening in the woods at the bottom of a hill. It’s near an intermittent creek, surrounded by trees. I named that spot the Pocket Prairie. To explore it, I mowed a trail through it.

The ground is often wet there. That may be why trees haven’t invaded. It is home to wildflowers that I don’t find up top, where the ground is drier. It’s a magical feeling to enter. This Pocket Prairie is where I discovered a native Iowa wildflower named Winged Loosestrife.

Facets of a found gem

Only a few blooms open at a time on each stem. Winged Loosestrife’s flowers are so small you could hold a bouquet in your fingertips. The blossoms always look wrinkled, as if made from super-thin tissue paper.

From the center of a flower, there emerges a long column, called the style, with a whitish cap at the end, called the stigma. The stigma looks moist. A microscope view resolves the style into a mass of transparent, gelatinous droplets. Slightly sticky, they catch and keep any grains of pollen that touch them.

Where are the wings?

The plant is named not for its flowers but for its stem, which has four membranous flanges, evenly spaced around the stem. They give this plant the first part of its name, Winged Loosestrife.

The flanges are so narrow that it seems a stretch to call them “wings.” They would hardly support flight. They are hard even to see without a microscope. Yet botanists have doubled down on the idea. The scientific name of the plant, Lythrum alatum, also invokes the stem (alatum = wings) as well as the petals (lythrum = reddish).

Why is it called Loosestrife?

An account by first-century Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder said that loosestrife placed on oxen yokes would calm the animals and make them stop fighting — hence “loosen strife.”

Coming closer

The plant is inconspicuous when buried in prairie. When I first found it in the Pocket Prairie, I figured it might be hard to find it again when the seeds ripened. So I marked some plants with fluorescent tape.

From the seeds I collected, a few plants joined my garden last year. Every morning, I water them with whatever is left in the jug after I refill the birdbath. I make sure they have wet feet. They like that.

They seem happy in their new home, where I can see them every day. A crab spider likes them, too and finds a home in the flowers.

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Nine years ago, a friend sent me some seeds she collected in her southeast Iowa forest. Formerly, Green Dragon must also have lived right here in what is now my woods, but I had never seen one. I wanted to bring it back.

Awakening dragon

Coming up in spring, the Green Dragon first holds its leaflets close to its sides, compressed and rolled lengthwise, as if to avoid being noticed. I think of a mythical beast creeping up from its lair.

Over a few weeks, the leaflets raise themselves up and separate, until they’re level and parallel to the ground. A full-grown dragon may reach knee high, looming over its shorter forest neighbors.

During a Green Dragon’s long infancy, it makes no flowers. For several years, it slowly builds its strength. Eventually it produces a single flowering shoot. There are no bright colors. It doesn’t even look like a flower.

Spathe

An odd structure rises alongside the main stalk. It looks something like a hoodie with a pointed top. Botanists call the hoodie a spathe. The spathe wraps around a spike of miniature flowers, concealing them inside.

Spadix

Inside the spathe, the flower spike is crusted with small blossoms. Above, the spike thins and extends upward like a curving needle for another ten inches or so. This part is bare, without any flowers. Botanists call the spike a spadix, which includes both the part covered in flowers and the naked extension. Its function is a question for speculation.

Hidden glory

Some of the uppermost flowers may peek out where the spathe wraps around the spadix, like a vest partly showing under the lapels of a coat.

In some Green Dragons, near the bottom of the spathe is a small hole. The hole provides an exit for gnats who have found their way down into the spathe. While crowded in there with the flowers, gnats get smeared with pollen. If they are lucky enough to escape through the hole, they may enter another Green Dragon’s spathe and deliver pollen there.

Growing the green one

My friend’s seeds germinated the following spring in a nursery box protected from rodents. Each plant made only a single leaf the size of my thumbnail that first year. Soon the leaf withered, as do most spring-blooming woodland plants. Down in the soil, a small corm conserved each plant’s life.

To my relief, the Green Dragons emerged again after the next winter. Over the years, they slowly grew larger and produced more leaflets.

At four years old, my biggest plant had five leaflets. I settled it, along with its somewhat smaller siblings, into my shade garden. Each spring, it rose green and grew a little taller than the year before. In summer it collapsed again into the brown earth, leaving no trace aboveground.

When it was seven, it formed a spathe and a spadix with a golden green extension, which stretched waveringly to the top of the plant. My hopes for seeds rose with it.

However, no seeds formed. It turns out that smaller Green Dragons have only male flowers. Although they can provide pollen to larger dragons, which have female flowers, they cannot make seeds themselves. The next year it was the same, with a flower spike but no seeds. I sighed and muttered, “Next year…”

This year, at age nine, that largest of Green Dragons has 10 leaflets, the most it has ever produced. A big dragon. And this time it is making seeds.

Green seeds bulge from the spathe. Each day they are a little fatter. By fall, they should be bright blood-red. The color will mean they are ready to collect. They promise me more Green Dragons. My woods await.

REFERENCES

BONAP: Native range of Green Dragon, Arisaema dracontium MAP

Size-dependent Gender Change in Green Dragon (Arisaema dracontium; Araceae), Keith Clay, American Joumal of Botany 80(7): 769-777. 1993. Abstract of scientific paper

Sex-ratio variation among Arisaema species with different patterns of gender diphasy, Charles R. Richardson and Keith Clay, Plant Species Biology (2001) 16, 139–149. Abstract of scientific paper

See Notes for the one leaf that grew on each plant in the first year.

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My Large-flowered Beardtongues surprised me. Photos had not prepared me for the lavish spires of rose-purple blossoms that shot upward beside my front door.

The long flowers tilt slightly downward. I had to lean over and bend my neck to look up into them. Then I could appreciate the flower’s hollow shape and see the structures inside.

The stamens

Thin tubes rise from the back of the flower's throat. They curve forward, pressing against the inside surface of the petals. They look as if they’re holding the blossom open, like a skeletal framework.

Those tubes are the flower’s male structures, the stamens. The tip of each stamen is a knobby anther, where insects find the pollen they eat or feed to their young.

Anthers in hiding

Many flowers have brightly colored anthers, to entice pollinators to visit. However, Large-flowered Beardtongue’s anthers are not very colorful. What’s worse, they’re tucked up out of sight in the roof of the flower. An insect flying past might not even notice them.

If it really wanted to attract pollinators, you’d think this plant could make its anthers look a little fancier and more enticing.

Well, in fact the beardtongue does have a specialized stamen that seizes attention. It sticks itself forward toward the mouth of the flower, like a tongue. Its tip is fuzzy and gold, in vibrant contrast with the purplish petals.

The fancy but fake anther

A bumblebee, noticing the gold, lands on the lip of the flower. But it doesn’t find pollen there. It was all false advertising.

Still, once inside, the bee discovers nectar down in the depths of the flower. As it pushes its way in to suck the sweetness, it picks up actual pollen on its back and wings.

Pollination is accomplished. And the bee gets fed. The reward may not be the one it expected, but bees need both pollen and nectar. Maybe it forgives being tricked.

The stamen with the fake anther has a special name — staminode.

Real anthers get their color from grains of pollen. This fake anther is gold because of its special hairs, which under the microscope look something like autumn leaves. They attach firmly to the shaft of the staminode and do not brush off. Even if they did, the bee would find no nutrition in them.

Common name: Large-flowered Beardtongue

This plant is one of over 250 species of closely related flowers in North America. They nearly all have the word “beardtongue” in their name, referring to the tongue-like staminode that characterizes this group. In many species, its tip looks fuzzy. You could even say bearded.

Large-flowered Beardtongue has a bigger blossom than almost any other beardtongue species (up to 2.5 inches long). So its name proclaims this as the “large-flowered” one among all the beardtongues.

Scientific name: Penstemon grandiflorus

• pente: Greek for “five”

• stemon: Greek for “stamen”

• grandis: Latin for “large”

• floris: Latin for “of the flower”

Hence Penstemon grandiflorus.

Nearly all of the 250+ species of Penstemon are native only to North America. (A very few have been found in Mexico and Guatemala.) The Penstemon genus has more species than any other genus of North American flowering plants. It must be doing something right.

Pink-purple flowers leaned out over the stream, lavish among mosses, ferns, and other wildflowers.

I didn’t know what they were.

I wanted a closer look, but there was no way to reach the plants, across the deep creek and against a cliff that dropped as straight as a curtain. Without success I searched the banks on my side of the creek for more of the flowers.

At home I paged through Wildflowers of Iowa Woodlands, by Sylvan T. Runkel, until I found it. Wild Geranium, a native wildflower widespread in Eastern North America.

I needed this plant where I could see it every day. I needed it near my home.

A friend, a horticulturist by profession and passion, invited me on a mid-spring day to see his White Oak grove. He seemed quite set on our walking to the site from a certain direction.

As we rounded a hill, an expanse of Wild Geraniums appeared suddenly. Masses of lavender and violet blossoms quilted the sloping ground. They were radiant in sunlight that filtered through the leaves of ancient oak trees.

I was gasping at the sight, my eyes filled with the unspeakably lovely colors of the petals.

My friend was smiling. “This is why I wanted to come from this direction. So that you would get the full effect.”

He gave me permission to come back and collect seeds when they ripened, which I joyfully took him up on. That fall, I scattered seeds under an oak tree next to my home.

The next year, Wild Geraniums came up all over.

The big, odd leaves were instantly recognizable, with their deeply cut lobes and toothy borders. The plants did not bloom that year. They spent their first year building their roots.

The next year, the buds opened. What impressed me most were the ten custard-yellow anthers, accented by fine red lines.

Wild Geraniums are some of the easiest plants I’ve ever grown. They seem to prefer the shade of deciduous trees, but I’ve found them in sunny locations, too. They like the soil damp, but they get along even when it’s dry. They thrive in deep loamy soil but can also grow in rocky ground.

Every year I cut some stems as they’re going to seed and toss them where I’d like to see more Wild Geraniums.

How many more? I’ll let the Wild Geraniums decide.

I love this early spring wildflower. But it is the leaf that impresses me most.

Bloodroot emerges from the ground long before most plants wake up. What you see first is a single leaf, wrapping like a cloak around something that is still hidden.

The prominent, raised veins look as if blood is coursing through them. They almost throb.

The plant is named for its red root. If it is cut, it bleeds red juice. The leaves too seem alive with blood.

A bud noses out of its leaf cloak. Now we see what the leaf has been protecting. Each Bloodroot stalk makes just one leaf and just one flower.

The leaf has a sculptured quality, like ancient arabesques. Slowly, the leaf loosens its grip. The blossom rises above it and spreads its petals.

Now we get our first glimpse of the inside of the leaf, which will become the upper side when it is fully open.

The flower is in bloom only for a couple of days, during which the leaf is still partly furled. After the flower is finished, the leaf grows and flattens until it’s as wide as an outspread hand. Then the Bloodroot’s second glory is revealed.

The open leaf is flat, elegant, complex. Where the flower bloomed, a single pod appears, containing perhaps a dozen seeds, or sometimes as few as five.

Even the seed looks bloody. If you’re interested in the unusual story of the Bloodroot’s seed and what happens next, click here.

Bumblebees are hungry too. They need nectar and pollen. So Virginia Bluebells call them. In Bluebell language, the word for “Come hither” is BLUE.

Pink is the color of buds and barely opening blossoms, but to pollinators of Virginia Bluebells, pink means “Not yet.” When the flowers are ready to be pollinated, then the pink turns into blue.

The first time a newly emerged bee finds Virginia Bluebells, it might go to a bud or to a pink flower.

For that, it gets nothing.

But when it tries a blue flower, it gets a big, sweet reward. Blue Virginia Bluebells have pollen for the taking and nectar for the slurping.

Bees are not born knowing the color code in this flower. They learn it from experience.
See summary of research by Jonathan W. Enz, 1992.

There must be an instant of realization, a moment when a bee figures out that the blue blossoms are the only ones that are worth going to.

Of course, it’s not enough to grok the meanings of pink and blue. The bee has to learn to identify Virginia Bluebells, too. The pink-and-blue code is just for this flower.

Many other pink flowers do offer food to bees.

Milkweeds, most of which have pink blossoms, give copious nectar. In my garden, big fuzzy bees dip their proboscises into the blossoms all day long when the milkweeds are in bloom. Other pink flowers, such as wild roses, are superb sources of pollen. Bumblebees and many other pollinators visit their pinkness eagerly.

Among the bluebells, however, the bees go only for the blue.

Blooming under leafless trees

Virginia Bluebells are spring ephemerals, adapted to life in the woods. They need sunlight, but only for a few weeks, before the trees leaf out. During their short time in the sun, they emerge from the ground, flower, form seeds, and disperse them.

By the time the green canopy closes over the forest, Virginia Bluebells have died back to the roots. Their leaves and stems disappear completely, leaving no clue to where they were. The following spring, they will grow up again from the root, and new seedlings will come up near the mother plant.

Where to find them

I don’t know why the state of Virginia ought to get all the credit for the most gorgeous blue flowers of spring. Virginia Bluebells grow in many eastern states and in over half the counties of Iowa. They are native to eastern North America.

Planting Purple Prairie Clover seeds is an homage to the future. Like most perennials, these seeds won’t turn into blooming plants until more than a year has passed. But how quickly the years race by. And generations. These native wildflowers might remain on this land long after I and everyone I know are gone.

During the first summer of its life, Purple Prairie Clover hides most of its earnings below ground. Roots drive down into the soil, reaching deeper than I am tall. Perennial prairie flowers invest in themselves.

This year, small plants will emerge, dressed entirely in green. According to the deer and rabbits, Purple Prairie Clover leaves are scrumptious. I stake small, wire-mesh cages around the plants to protect them.

After the first couple of years, the leaves don’t seem to attract their devourers so much. Maybe they grow tough and less tasty. If the plants do get chomped, they will likely grow back from the root.

In their second summer, with their roots secure in earth, Purple Prairie Clovers send up velvety spikes that are covered in buds. By July, the lowest buds open into tiny flowers, or florets, each only 1/4 inch long. The florets flare out all around the spike, like a ballerina’s tutu.

Purple Prairie Clover is in bloom for a long time. Over the span of a few weeks, the tutu rides up the flower spike. Toward the bottom, in the spent flowers, seeds are forming. Buds at the top await their time.

As the florets open, their anthers form a golden halo. The color signals pollen, and it attracts many species of native bees. Female leafcutter bees gather pollen for their nests, which may be hidden in hollow plant stems. When the eggs hatch, the larvae feed on the pollen provisioned by their mother.

Adult leafcutter bees seldom eat the pollen themselves. It is food for baby bees. What the mother eats is nectar. Purple Prairie Clover supplies that also.

Starting from seed

Despite its name, Purple Prairie Clover does not belong to the clovers. It is a legume, like beans and peas. As it grows, it enriches the soil, benefiting other flowers and grasses.

The seeds look like miniature beans, less than 1/16 inch in diameter. Tiny, but they are food for Wild Turkeys and Northern Bobwhites. I’ve seen bobwhites walking through my backyard toward the prairie patch. Purple Prairie Clover seeds may be what they’re after.

This summer, I will be gathering the seeds too.

Where does Purple Prairie Clover grow?

Purple Prairie Clover is a native wildflower of the North American prairie states.