Day 169: I'd gone prowling in the local woods on a trillium hunt only a few days prior to a hike in the Mossyrock area, returning home without having observed a single leaf. Our populations of this native wildflower have suffered greatly from human predation (for that is what I choose to call it), and now they are no longer as abundant in our lowland forests as they were when I was a youngster. I suppose they would still be categorized as "common," although it has been many years since I would have chosen that term to describe their occurrence. Nowadays, each and every one delights me with its flower almost as much as the clusters of them in the acreage behind our house did when I was a child. I remember picking one, bringing it home to my mother who gave me a stern lecture on its fragile botany, and never again did I look at the plant in quite the same way. It may have been that lesson which first made me aware of man's sins against nature; in any event, I learned to respect and value plant life in situ from that moment forward. Perhaps that's why I make this annual pilgrimage to find the first trilliums of the season: penance, and to ask their forgiveness for the one of their number which I so brutally destroyed almost three-quarters of a century ago.
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