Ephemerals & Memory
Living in Place
The Brief Season of Spring Ephemerals
The brief season of the spring ephemerals is coming to an end.
Ephemerals are perennial wildflowers that grow, bloom, and fade within a few days. During their brief season, I make a point of walking along a riverside path.
The mottled leaves of the trout lilies spearing through the leaf litter are the first to emerge. I keep returning to the woodland path where they grow, impatient for their yellow flowers to bloom.
I never see trout lilies without remembering the first time I learned their name. It was on a hike on Mount Cube, in New Hampshire. At the trailhead, one of the friends in our group said, “We might see the trout lilies in bloom.”
“What are trout lilies?” I asked.
“A spring wildflower.”
Sure enough, we came across a breathtaking colony of them, where my friend pointed out the leaf, mottled like the side of a brook trout. The characteristics of this yellow flower made an indentation in my brain, and the information has stuck.
That’s not the case of the small sometimes white, sometimes pink flower hanging above a bouquet of three lobed leaves with saw-tooth edges. It’s a flower whose name perennially escapes me no matter how carefully I observe its details: the number of petals (really petaloid sepals if you want to get technical, which I don’t) and three-lobed leaves. For years, I turned to my old-school field guide, and rediscovered the flower’s name: rue anemone. But recently, I consulted an online guide only to learn that the name of the flower I may have been forgetting isn’t rue anemone, but false rue anemone, both members of the buttercup family. The Illinois Native Plant Society website reassures me that I’m not alone in confusing false anemone (Enemion biternatum) and rue anemone (Thalictrum thalictroides), which is a great relief. I’m just hoping I can remember “anemone” when they bloom again next year.
Epherals & Memory
Spring ephemerals thrive in the sunlight that shines onto the forest floor before trees’ leaves unfold and the forest canopy blocks sunlight to the understory. The brief season of woodland spring ephemerals again becomes a memory.
A similar pale veil threatens to obscure my memory —possibly the scariest aspect of aging. But as these ephemeral flowers are teaching me, there is a strategy for making, maintaining, and possibly even improving memory: by telling myself stories about what I want to remember, the way I learned to identify trout lilies.
By telling this story, I will now remember both rue and false anemone, with their barely indistinguishable delicate blooms that open just as the trout lilies fade and before the trillium appear. And I reassure myself, that even without their names, these fleeting flowers still beckon me into the woods each spring.
I, too, go out of my way to witness the spring ephemerals every year in Southern Vermont throughout the month of April and early May. Coltsfoot is the first sign of spring in the woods I walk most often in April. A trail at the base of a large cliff face affords great ephemeral stalking. It's OK when they fade away because spring green has arrived in full force by now.
Oh, how I miss those spring ephemerals!