I try not to tread on Spring Beauty in the woods along Crow Creek. It’s hard to avoid the tiny flowers now, because they carpet the trail. In the stream’s damp, flat oxbows, the ground is turning white and pink.
Spring Ephemerals
Like other spring ephemerals, Spring Beauty blooms early, sucking up sunlight before the trees leaf out and shade the forest floor. For a month or two, this is the easiest woodland wildflower to find in much of eastern North America.
It has persisted despite a lot of human disturbance. It thrives in woodlands and parks. Often Spring Beauty even shows up in shadier lawns and backyards, provided the area isn’t mowed too early and hasn’t suffered assault from herbicides.
Most Spring Beauty flowers have white petals. Some look pink. At close inspection, you see pink or purplish lines threading out from the center.
A taste for pollen
The flower conducts business with its anthers, five frosty knobs that wobble enticingly at the ends of slender filaments. The anthers are loaded with pink pollen.
Of course, if you’re an insect, pollen is delicious. And when insects collect pollen, they spread it around, pollinating the flowers in the process. Such an equitable transaction!
Spring Beauty’s own bee
Because Spring Beauty opens before other flowers, it’s important to those hungry pollinators, including its own personal, dedicated bee.
A tiny, native “mining bee” specializes in Spring Beauty flowers. A female Spring Beauty Mining Bee emerges from an underground burrow just as her favored flower comes into bloom. She gathers the pink pollen and puts packets of it into burrows that she has prepared. She lays one egg on each packet. When the eggs hatch, the pollen nourishes the larvae.
There’s a word for a bee who depends primarily on a single plant or a closely related group of species: oligolege. (Audio dictionaries disagree on exactly how to pronounce it, but the consensus seems to be something like “ALL a gull ledge.”) The Spring Beauty Mining Bee (Andrena erigeniae) is an oligolege of Spring Beauty flowers. Flower and bee serve one another.
Living the fast life
By mid spring, the woods are absolutely blanketed with Spring Beauty. However, time is short for spring ephemerals. Blooming, pollination, and seed formation all have to take place in the short interval before the trees leaf out. After blooming, the plants become inconspicuous and disappear until the next spring.
Now’s the time, until about mid May where I live.
To find your own Spring Beauty, here’s a map showing in light green where it is found.
I live on the south coast of Massachusetts and according to the map I'm in one of the few communities without Spring Beauty! However, a group I'm in is trying to promote No Mow May to encourage people to not mow their lawns till after May. This supports early blooming flowers and pollinators and also provides them some extra cover and habitat as they emerge. Maybe someday Spring Beauty will make its way to us!
Great timing to see this post. I believe these are what I have in my yard. They are so pretty, but I haven't seen them in past years.