Trilliums And Ants have A Mutual Understanding The stames of giant trilliums contain large amounts of yellow pollen collected by wild bees for making bee bread. Today I spent considerable time outdoors on my knees. It would have been especially satisfying if a few of those hours could have gone toward planting garden seeds, but it is still too cold and wet here to do that. Past experience has taught us that the seeds of sugar snap peas, for example, simply rot in the ground if they don’t have the proper heat to germinate. Working to eradicate a patch of very aggressive plants, the Japanese knotweed (Polygonum cuspidatum), from one of the state’s natural areas also kept me pretty close to the ground for a part of the day. Following that I marveled at the richness of blossoms in our woods, large-flowering trilliums like you wouldn’t believe. With digital camera in hand I inched my way along the edge of what I call my "Mother’s Day Trillium Hill" east of our house. When you slow down your pace and get really close to the ground it’s incredible the number of wildflower leaves you’ll encounter. Some day I think I’ll carefully mark out a plot, at least ten feet by ten feet, along that special slope and study it intensively for several consecutive years. Outwardly the vegetation at this season is largely composed of the showy large-flowered or giant trillium, Trillium grandiflorum, but plenty of other wildflowers grow along with these spectacular members of the lily family. With careful observation you should find, for example, Solomon’s plume, Canada Mayflower, both the northern and southern species of spring beauties, bellwort, trout lily, blue cohosh, Dutchman’s breeches, squirrel corn, wild leek, sweet cicely, several species of violets, hepatica, rosy twisted stalk, and a few others. Once you begin scrutinizing a small patch of the woodland floor you realize that many of the small single leaves are very young trillium plants, no more than a quarter inch wide and an inch or so long. You’re also going to locate many tiny three-leaved trillium plants no taller than a few inches that are naturally much too small to have blossoms. Occasionally you come upon a very robust flowering trillium, often two separate plants emanating from one point on the ground, that are literally surrounded by a few dozen tiny "baby" trillium plants. Here might be a case whereby the ants either missed gathering the seeds from these plants or at least didn’t gather all of them. Or the large number of small plants may represent the site of one of the ants’ refuse piles. Researchers in the past have come to the conclusion that ants are especially fond of a part of the trillium seed called the elaiosome (e-LIE-o-soam) or strophiole (STRO-fee-oal). Around one-half of what constitutes one seed consists of this material that is a readily-digested fatty substance (for the ants) that they actually appear to crave. The seeds are taken below the ground into the ants’ chambers where the elaiosome is eaten and the remainder of the seed, containing the embryo, is discarded. Eventually these perfectly viable seeds are gathered, along with ant feces, dead ants and other natural debris from the colony, and deposited on the ants’ so-called "compost pile," which, when chemically tested, is considerably like 10-10-10 fertilizer that so many gardeners use today. The claim has been made that these seeds, so deposited, germinate better and more reliably than those seeds that simply drop to the ground next to the parent plant. In fact it is thought that some wildflower seeds germinate only on the refuse piles of the ants that initially consumed the sought-after strophiole. Frederick Case and his wife, Roberta, who wrote and illustrated the outstanding book, "Trilliums," did much research with many species of trilliums in their wild gardens near Saginaw, Michigan. Pollination, germination, fruit, seeds, flower structure, diseases, mutations and abnormalities are only some of the topics discussed and shown in beautiful colored photographs. Their findings reveal without question that picking a wild trillium does not kill the plant but will set it back so that it may not produce another blossom for a year or two. The mature plant’s rhizome, "a modified, creeping stem, usually horizontal and underground," helps the plant survive to bloom again some day. Even though for several years toward the end of my Mother’s life we presented her with a huge bouquet of trilliums picked in our woods, we enjoy them today where they grow – and leave them so. The Cases wrote, "With continued population growth and all its demands upon the land, we can expect that wildflower populations of all types will be increasingly stressed and damaged. We ought to set about now, before they become endangered, to protect our native plant treasures for the future." This column appeared in the Door County Advocate on 05/23/2003. © Copyright 2003 Roy Lukes. All rights reserved.