Trillium Spotting
On the tenth day of spring I got a text message from a good friend and fellow woods wanderer: “The trilliums are just now blooming in the Grand Forest. Diamonds tucked into moss.”
The thrill I felt at reading her message was tinged ever so slightly with disappointment—that my friend was the deliverer of such glad tidings, not the trilliums themselves, whom I had just visited the day before. At dusk I had walked the steep trail through Gazzam Lake where they are tucked in easy-to-miss pockets lining its switchbacks. I squinted against the gathering darkness in the places I knew they grew, trying to pick up on the brightness of their white blooms. I hadn’t seen any.
No matter, I decided, they’d be happy to see me—and I them—even if I was late to this spring’s bloom. My dog and I headed to the woods early the next morning. To my relief, our morning visitation confirmed our dusk findings from 36 hours previous: the trilliums of Gazzam Lake had yet to flower.
The Grand Forest sits at the center of Bainbridge Island. About three miles to its southwest, tucked against the Salish Sea, is Gazzam Lake. I know that microclimates—a biologist friend once told me Bainbridge Island has seven—at least partly explain this. But it’s as if spring’s advance falls somewhere in the few miles that span the distance from one patch of this plant to the next, a wave of blooms erupting in its wake.
Trillium are so named for a repetition of parts in triplicate—three leaves, three sepals, three petals, three stigmas. On my morning walk, the trio of green sepals clutching the white bundle of unfurled petals on the closest to flowering trillium I found had just begun to loosen their grasp. The petals would probably follow suit in the inbound warming and sunny weather.
+
Among my informal Gazzam Lake forest studies over the years I’ve included an annual trillium count. I’ve never recorded this number—each feels so unique as I note it that I’m sure it will pulse at me from a mental map that I can layer into a chronology at the conclusion of each walk’s census. This technique, of course, fails me; I count each year, nonetheless.
Along with my counts, I’ve made a point of clearing space around the trilliums, particularly if any invasive plants are present. Trilliums are perennial and will spread slowly via their rhizomatous roots, but they reproduce by seed. My Plants of the Pacific Northwest elucidates:
Each seed has a little, oil-rich appendage that is attractive to ants. The ants lug the seeds back to their nests, where they eat the appendages or feed them to the larvae and then discard the remaining seeds on their rubbish piles. This is a reasonably effective mechanism for seed dispersal, especially for plants of the dim, becalmed forest floor.
There has to be hospitable ground for the seed to land; even when the two meet, it can take as long as ten years for a seed to evolve into a mature, flowering plant. The most prolific patch of trilliums I know in Gazzam Lake numbered somewhere in the upper teens last year. A drift of flowering trilliums accrues over decades. I imagine watching this patch fill in over my lifetime, each year a shy plant or two joining the gentle ranks, slowly working up the courage to bloom.
+
“Important places can provide a sense of continuity over time,” writes researcher Leila Scannell of her content analysis-based place attachment studies. In fact, memory is the most commonly cited psychological benefit of place attachment Scannell has identified in this research, reported by over two-thirds of participants. “Place can serve as the site of on-going traditions, such as annual holiday gatherings or cultural events.”
Or an informal trillium census. I don’t remember how long ago I first noticed trillium growing by the trail that climbs the slope from the sea’s edge to Gazzam Lake. I’m sure I counted what I saw though—that is my habit, however it disappoints me that my instincts aren’t more profound, less perfunctory. I’m sure, too, that I reflexively cleared some space around them, knowing their slow growth habits—that is also my habit. The next year I knew where to look, and when. With time, a ritual emerged.
As a child, I sensed and longed to acknowledge the holy in the passing of winter to spring each year. It felt an injustice that the celebration of Easter was forbidden by the spare and conservative expression of Christianity into which I was born. But Easter’s thin veil of Christianity failed to obscure its blatantly pagan origins from the keen eyes of those who decided such things for me. The holiday, along with its egg hunting, was expressly disallowed.
My trillium rites of spring appease that child. I imagine trillium spotting is not unlike Easter egg hunting—both requiring a keen eye, a sense of delight. Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox. Trillium, a lily, also has a range of time in which it appears, but the two events—Easter and the trillium bloom—reliably overlap. The variety of trillium that grows in Gazzam Lake, Trillium ovatum, flower white, but some deepen to pink as their blooms fade—not unlike the transformation of a dyed egg—for reasons unknown. And they are the first of the woodland ephemera to rise from the dead of winter and bloom on the forest floor each year, the original resurrection acknowledged by ancient vernal celebrations.
“The flower blooms early in the spring (March – May), just as the robins appear, or ‘wake up,’ giving rise to the alternative common name ‘wake-robin.’” Even from my guidebook this flower enchants.
As I trained my gaze on the ground for the telltale whorl of trillium leaves pushing through the soil, I registered all the other seasonal advances. I checked the wild ginger patches for blooms, but their new leaves had just begun uncurling on the soil’s surface. The skunk cabbage had pushed their sunny lanterns through the muck, though, and the deer foot had sent up their slender stalks. Each of their folded trio of leaves looked like the closed maw of a carnivorous plant from a more exotic clime. One drift of deer foot I stooped to admire in profile made me laugh out loud—their disembodied, fanged mouths nodded by the dozens in the dappled sun.
+
The next day, Alex and I headed up into the Olympic Mountains from the rain-shadowed town of Sequim, on the north end of the peninsula. We chose the Slab Camp Trail that connects into Deer Valley from the south bank of the Gray Wolf River. Our elevation was around 2,500 feet at the trailhead, so I didn’t head out looking for trilliums, but about three miles down the trail, Alex glimpsed one emerging from a thick tuft of green on the steep bank of a switchback. The flower he pointed out was a perfect bud exquisitely set in the aperture of its whorled leaves. My friend’s “diamonds set in moss” comment echoed.
Cow-parsnip pushed their thick, umbelled stalks through the river’s sandy margins in regimental patches. We found duos and trios of trout lilies tucked into tufts of moss here and there, though they too had yet to bloom. But we spotted just two more trilliums on our twelve mile hike.
The following morning—Easter—we woke up at Salt Creek Recreation Area. We headed out from our campsite, climbing the ridge at its back to Striped Peak. The translucent pink lanterns of bleeding hearts glowed from the trail’s edge in the clearcut on the ridge. Interspersed, the crimson tinged leaves of Indian paintbrush began to relax from their rigidly upright positions. As we descended, a single fairy slipper marked the confluence of the Strait Slope Trail and the Cove Trail. Maidenhair fern hung their loose green fists from thin wrists off the wet rockface of the cove, still a month from entirely unclenching.
By the time I was free to observe Easter, I had no wish to. No religious inclination remained, no attachment to the risen Christ. I was too old for egg hunts and otherwise too preoccupied to unearth some more resonant meaning in the once-forbidden holiday. But now?
What is the relationship between tradition and memory and the holy? By what means do our places hold such abstractions for us? How is this all connected? I don’t want to dispel my own wonder by trying to name it; I’m content with my curiosity and my trillium watch.
We came across a patch of trilliums toward the end of our Easter hike, blinking in the sun—a phenomenon of maybe ten minutes on the occasion that cloud coverage and sun angle cooperate. They were a community of twenty or so, most of them still too young to bloom, or perhaps just disinclined this year, as happens. But a small number of them—five, six—were beginning to unfurl their trios of white petals. Sunny anthers peaked out from inside, reaching for and welcoming the warmth.
This is where I find and make meaning now, on “the dimmed, becalmed forest floor,” where each spring, in the few moments before the canopy closes out the sun with leaves, these perfect little flowers bloom, a clockwork resurrection.
