Perspective: In the spring, I get a thrill when I see my first trillium
These elegant woodland flowers are called trilliums because they have just three lovely petals. They are also known as “wake robin” because they traditionally bloom in little patches of sunlight in the forest about the same time the spring robins appear.
Trillium have a deal with ants. The plants produce seeds attached to a tasty morsel called an elaiosome. Ants take the whole package back to their nests, eat the fatty, protein-rich elaiosomes, and then throw out the seeds in their trash, where they can germinate in a rich compost of ant-refuse. This mode of dispersing seeds is tidy but doesn’t take the seeds particularly far. One study found 67 percent of new trillium plants within three feet of their parent plants.
Mice like trillium seeds, and unlike ants, they eat the elaiosomes and the seeds. In regrowing clearcuts and nearby forests, there are so many mice that nearly all the trillium seeds are eaten. Sometimes, you can still find trillium flowers in clearcuts. But they are older than the cut, reblooming and setting seed each year, but without any of their seeds surviving. Jules feared that the enthusiastic harvest of timber in the Northwest would doom trillium in a plague of mice.
Meanwhile, populations of the flower in the remaining bits of old forest will probably stay stable, so there will be sources for seeds when the surrounding forest becomes more hospitable to the flower, when some trees start dying, creating gaps in the canopy and building up forest soil. One doesn’t have to be a devoted botanist to find or identify one, nor is it cryptic and tiny. It is easy to spot, showy and bright against the greens and browns of the understory. But it isn’t so common as to be unremarkable.
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