Trilliums Take Years To Mature The large-flowered trillium season will soon be here, one of the Upper Midwest's greatest natural performances. My guess is that I saw my first trillium when I was five years old, around 70 years ago. It was an annual May ritual of my parents to take our family to one of my dad’s favorite woods near Casco Junction, jokingly referred to us as the Toonerville Trolley Woods because of the wonderfully undulating nearby tracks of the Kewaunee-Green Bay & Western Railroad. Following what usually was our first outdoor picnic of the year (We were always "antsy" for our first picnic!) we hiked the woods and returned home with several beautiful bouquets of wildflowers including some large-flowered trilliums, Trillium grandiflorum. I have always preferred to not call it the giant trillium because some of the young plants of this species, blooming for the first time, may be unusually small. You can easily imagine how delighted Charlotte and I were when, upon purchasing our present land in 1977, we discovered literally thousands of the large-flowered trilliums growing there. Now that we owned the land and its plants, we could legally do whatever we pleased with the wildflowers. How my mother loved the large bouquet of trilliums we brought to her each Mother’s Day. They were always picked on the gradually sloping wooded hill west of our house, which we refer to as our Mother’s Day Trillium Hill. Yes we were firmly scolded by a number of people upon learning that we cut around 25 of the largest of the trilliums we could find each year to bring to Kewaunee to my mother. NO -- cutting a trillium will not kill the plant. Yes, this will set it back a few years but eventually it will continue to produce blossoms. However, please don’t cut trilliums unless you own them or have the owner’s permission! It was on my mother’s last Mother’s Day in May of 1990, before she died, that we brought a huge bouquet of the magnificent white wildflowers to her again in the nursing home. She had suffered several strokes and reached a point in her life whereby she was no longer talking. We propped her up in bed and placed the trilliums on a tray in front of her. Her eyes got bigger and bigger as I asked her, "Well, mother, how do you like the trilliums?" There was no response for at least a minute -- but then she struggled with her speech and, to our surprise and joy, slowly replied, "They’re -- beautiful!" Those were the last words she spoke. I’ll let you guess which wildflower is now my favorite! The first trilliums to bloom each year in our woods have been up a few inches for at least a week along our garden path and are stalled due to the cold and rainy weather. Invariably they are very small when in full flower, perhaps only a fifth as tall as the tallest which may be upwards of 20 inches tall at anthesis (an-THEE-sis), its peak of flowering. So many people have asked me about the period of time between the germination of a trillium seed and the development of the first blossom. I’ve been re-reading one of my all-time favorite plant books in my library, "Trilliums," by Frederick W. Case, Jr. and Roberta B. Case. I’ve known Fred since 1957 when he was one of my favorite presenters (on carnivorous plants) at the Wisconsin Audubon Camp. He was one of Michigan’s most outstanding high school biology teachers and, with his wife, now deceased, conducted much plant research with especially trilliums and carnivorous plants. According to the Case’s findings, here is the answer to the question of time elapsing between seed germination and flowering. The seedlings of trilliums do not appear above the ground until the second spring following dispersal, which most often is accomplished by ants, referred to as "myrmecochory," (mir-meh-COE-co-re). Here in general is the sequence. The seeds ripen the first summer and drop to the ground where they are either covered by falling leaves or are carried underground by the ants who anxiously feast on the elaiosome (e-LIE-o-soam) which is loaded with nutritious and digestible oils of which the ants are very fond. The ants then carry the unharmed seed, minus the elaiosome, back to or near the surface of the ground where it will spend the winter. The warm spring of the second year will break the dormancy of the seedling within the seed causing the radicle to emerge from the seed and form a rhizome. The radicle is that portion of a plant embryo below the point of its cotyledon attachments. After this, the seedling, still underground, exists upon stored seed endosperm (enclosed food of a seed, such as a bean or peanut) without further growth until another period of slowly falling temperatures and winter have elapsed. The warm spring of its third year instigates growth and now the cotyledon emerges from the seed and the very first appearance above ground of the young plant occurs, a single small leaf. Now you can understand why botanists refer to this as double dormancy. The one-leaf state continues to appear for two to four more years. Not until a certain critical size and rhizome volume have been attained will the typical three leaves of a trillium plant be developed. Five, six or more years may have already gone by! A season or two later the first white trillium flower will be produced which may be quite small. It may be several more years before one of the really tall and robust "grandiflorum" trilliums decorates the spring woods. This column appeared in the Door County Advocate on 05/01/2004. © Copyright 2004 Roy Lukes. All rights reserved.