The Light In The Forest

Day 180: Trillium ovatum, the Trillium which used to be so common in Pacific Northwest forests, is becoming harder to find every year. In my childhood, they were everywhere, so abundant that I thought nothing of picking one or two to bring home to stick in a vase on the kitchen table, thus eliciting from my mother what may well have been my first lesson in plant ecology: that if the flower and leaves are picked, the plant has no means to photosynthesize, weakening the bulb until it is rendered non-vital, i.e., it dies. At age six or seven, I was so horrorstruck by this revelation and my part in it that I immediately went on a campaign, attempting to educate my classmates and to stop them from gathering the flowers. I don't know that I had much success, nor even in later years when I tried to discourage friends from digging the bulbs to transplant into their flower beds. Trilliums do not transplant well, and such misguided personal harvesting has been a factor in their current decline. Nurseries do offer cultivars bred to be more forgiving, although once put in place, they should be left there permanently. As for our woodland species, please let the light of their blooms shine in the forests of their choosing, undisturbed.