A hillside of wild blooms to brighten a dull spring day

Don’t have much time today to write a long post, but I did want to get these pictures up. Thanks to Melanie, one of the Toronto Field Naturalists’ leaders, who showed me where these lovely blooms were in  bud in Taylor Creek Park, I was able to go back a few days after our initial visit to get some photos of them in bloom.

These are the native bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis. They belong to the poppy family, (the Papaveraceae, if you care to be botanical about it), and as such are close relatives to another one of our spring flowers, the yellow-blossomed celandine, Chelidonium majus. Members of this family have radially symmetrical flowers, mostly borne singly.

Bloodroot, the crimson red roots of which I showed in an earlier posting this spring, are fragile spring flowers that open in full sunlight and close at night. And the blooms don’t last long — why they’re called spring ephemerals — so if you want to see these tiny white beauties that remind me of the song Edelweiss, from The Sound of Music [small and white, clean and bright. . .] you have to hit the muddy trail soon. For in just a few days these blooms will have vanished and other spring beauties, like the trilliums and trout lilies, will take their place.