Mountain Wildflowers

	"The Heart of the Blue Ridge"

Wildflowers

THE BLOODROOT

(Sanguinaria Canadensis)

(First Appeared in The Mountain Laurel, April, 1983 issue.)

A surer sign of spring than the robin in these parts is the appearance of the bloodroot flower. In April you can find these flowers in woods and along roadsides.

Bloodroot is a small plant, about eight inches high, with one white flower and one five to nine lobed leaf per plant, with the flower appearing from an open space at the base of the leaf.

The easiest way to identify this plant this plant is to break a stem. The sap of the plant is orange red (giving the plant its name.)

The root of the plant has a place in folk medicine as a cure for poison oak. You can either rub the sap from a freshly broken root on the affected area or make a tincture by soaking several cut roots in alcohol. Be sure the use is only external, never take internally.

Once you start looking for them, you will spot them everywhere.

Soloman's Seal

(First Appeared in The Mountain Laurel, June, 1983 issue.)

There are two varieties of wildflowers with the name Soloman's Seal, one True Soloman's Seal and one False Soloman's Seal. Both of these plants grow in abundance in the Blue Ridge, often side by side in forests and along roadsides.

Both plants are alike in that they have one central stem approximately two to three feet long, arching gracefully. They also have leaves alternately arranged on the stem. The leaves look very similar also.

The two plants are very easy to tell apart because of the location of the blooms. The False Soloman's Seal has a cluster of feathery, little white blooms at the end of the stem. The True Soloman's Seal has little cup shaped white blooms (usually in pairs) hanging under the stem. These blooms are practically hidden by the leaves.

In the fall, there is a cluster of purple specked, reddish berries on the False Soloman's Seal, weighting it down until the plant drops to the ground. The seed pods of the True Soloman's Seal are little round green pods about the size of a pea hanging where the blooms are in summer.

Trilliums

In May, one of the most beautiful and most abundant of all wild flowers in this part of the Blue Ridge begins to bloom. This is the Trillium. The trillium has three petals, three sepals and three leaves, thus the appropriate name, Trillium. It is in the Lily family. There are ten different members of this genus but the most common one is the Large-Flowered Trillium. The big, bell-shaped white flower, which usually turns to a delicate pink with age is on a stem 10 to 15 inches high. The bloom is at the top of the stem, surrounded by three large, round leaves with pointed tips. They grow in cool, moist wooded areas, not needing much sun. They can be an awesome sight because often there will be thousands of them in one patch.

A much smaller and rarer variety is the "Wake-Robin." It is a dark red color and you are lucky if you see two or three in one spot.

Get a good wildflower book and go for a walk in the woods in May or June and you're sure to see at least a few of the varieties of trilliums. These mountains are rich in wildflowers and offer the opportunity for you to see for yourself many flowers others can only hope to see in books. To see a rare wildflower face to face (face to petal if you must) is as exciting as viewing the Mona Lisa or any other rare work of art. Mother Nature has more than a few master pieces of her own!

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