Trout Lilies!

April 7, 2024

After watching a small patch of trout lily leaves for ten days, I missed a couple of days due to rainy mornings. Temperatures were warmer and I was eager to get back and see if the trout lilies were blooming - and a little worried I might miss them.

Trout lily blossom

When I got to the little patch I had been watching, I didn’t immediately see the blooms. The blooms are tiny, just an inch or two, and pale. It was easy to miss them even when I was looking right at them! As I’ve learned since, only about 1% of trout lilies flower in any given year, so the blooms are not tightly congregated like bluebells but rather spread out along the ground.

The stems find a way to the light, sometimes twisting and turning!

Sometimes the stems grow straight up and sometimes they wind and twist, perhaps seeking the light.

Two stems twisting together

As I was looking at my little patch, a friend passed by. She told me she was sure she had seen the trout lilies down a little further. I started walking and looking - and that’s when I discovered the big surprise the trout lilies had in store. They were EVERYWHERE. What I thought was a small patch stretched at least a quarter of a mile and went both up the hill from the path and down the hill to the creek below. There were thousands of trout lilies!

It’s hard to photograph how expansive they are because they are growing all along the ground through tangles of branches and trees.

This patch had a lot of blooms!

I looked carefully for open blooms but didn’t see any. Knowing that other kinds of lilies open with light and warmth, I guessed I might have to return in the afternoon to find open blossoms. Friday I was able to return in the afternoon and this guess turned out to be correct, the blossoms were open!

The blossoms open by curling open their petals, revealing the stamens inside. For the most part, they open with the stamens pointing towards the ground, though some were tilted a little more upright.

Had to search to find one pointing to the side instead of toward the ground.

According to a few articles I read online, trout lilies can be yellow or white. This patch is all white. The way they bloom and propagate themselves is also fascinating:

“Trout lilies have an incredibly cool propagation strategy and when left undisturbed, will form enormous colonies that live for centuries.  Most of the plants in a colony don’t actually bloom, but if they do and are pollinated, then seeds form in June. The next spring, the seeds germinate, and each sprouted seed forms a tiny corm, a bulb-like underground food storage stem that grows near the surface of the soil. The little corm produces threadlike “droppers”that burrow down at an angle of 45 degrees. By the end of the growing season, each dropper, deeper in the soil now and up to a foot away, will produce a new corm from food sent down the thread by the mother plant. Eventually the “umbilical cord” withers away and the young corm sends up a leaf of its own. After four years, one sprouted seed will have produced up to nine new plants with corms that burrowed down eight to ten inches or even deeper! In this way, the plants increase their numbers mostly by cloning rather than seed. In a trout lily colony, only about one percent of the plants will bloom in any given season. You can predict which plants will bloom as those that do will send up two leaves instead of one. It takes a lot more energy to make a flower and then go to seed.”¹

I also read that they are a source of early pollen and nectar for bumblebees and sure enough, I found a bumblebee on one of the flowers.

Walking in the afternoon held its own surprises. The light is different in the afternoon, brighter and more overhead. I hadn’t considered how adapted my eyes were to morning light until I realized how hard it was for me to spot things in the afternoon. Those white flowers were even more invisible in the bright light.

There was less birdsong in the afternoon and I saw fewer birds in general. There were, however, butterflies! I saw five different species of butterflies - sulphur butterflies, zebra swallowtails, pearl crescent butterflies, red admiral butterflies, and a spring azure.

Sulphur butterfly

The spring azure is a new butterfly for me!

I even found a single dragonfly! The photo lookup tool tells me it is a “stream cruiser”, which is a new one for me, I hadn’t heard that name before.

The trout lilies and my afternoon walk reinforced something I know but usually forget: no matter how aware I try to be and how much I look, I never see everything. I have walked on this path for ten years and never saw a trout lily until last year. The size of this patch and learning that these colonies can be hundreds of years old tells me they were always there, I just didn’t see them. The butterflies and dragonflies are there somewhere in the morning, but they are most likely hidden from my view.

Red admiral butterfly

Not only can I not be everywhere at once, but even where I am, I will never see everything. Anais Nin said, “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.” I see what my eyes have adapted to see and even then I probably miss 90%.

Pearl crescent butterfly

The trout lilies remind me, again, that I don’t know as much as I think I do and that the universe can always surprise me. They remind me that we often see what we are looking for and miss what we are not looking for. Uncertainty feels uncomfortable, yet uncertainty leaves the door open to see what we’ve been missing, to see something new, or to see in a new way.

It’s a bee party!

My friend Oriah Mountain Dreamer said:

What if you were sent here by something larger
Not against your will or wishes
But in alignment with your deepest longing
What if it was as simple as finding what you love
And letting it teach you how to live.

The trout lilies have taught me, again, to open myself to the possibilities. If I’m missing this much in a place where I think I pay attention, how much more am I missing in other parts of my life? If the universe can surprise me with thousands of little flowers, imagine the blessings that could appear in other parts of my life!

Thank you trout lilies. Thank you spring. Thank you universe.

1. Excerpt from Forgotten Flowers: Trout Lily