Wild things: Blossom of spring

By ED KANZE

Along with “Over the Rainbow” and a few other songs that despite extreme repetition always manage to stir me, “Edelweiss,” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music,” gets me every time. The notion of a “blossom of spring” that, even in the midst of hard times, will “bloom and grow forever” starts me thinking with great tenderness of the small but oh-so-lovely early spring wildflower known as hepatica.

I’m not sure why hepatica has gotten under my skin. Maybe it’s because it was a flower I discovered on my own, first spying the ground-hugging, leathery, three-parted leaves in the leaf litter after the last snow melted, and then coming along the same path a few weeks later and finding the plant’s tiny, pale-blue (they can also be white, pink, lavender or blue) flowers rising on fuzzy stems. In many places, in any given year, hepatica, after skunk cabbage, is the first native wildflower to unfurl its blossoms. There are two varieties, the round-lobed and the sharp-lobed, referring to the shape of the leaves. Some botanists see these two forms as separate species. Others see them as mere variations of the same. To complicate matters further, hepatica has long been attributed to its namesake genus, Hepatica with a capital “H,” but some botanists, citing molecular evidence, place it in the genus Anemone. Confused? You should be. Scientists are, too. Clarity may emerge with additional study. Mostly I’ve enjoyed hobnobbing with the round-lobed kind. 

In his essay “A Spring Relish,” John Burroughs (1837-1921), the Catskill-born naturalist who became the most celebrated nature writer of his time, calls hepatica “the gem of the woods.” Burroughs suggests that some hepaticas are sweet-scented, while others are not. He might be right. Spurred by “A Spring Relish,” which you can find in his book, “Signs and Seasons,” I spent an afternoon once, crawling on hands and knees from one hepatica clump to another, sniffing. I found that some of the hepaticas gave off a rich floral bouquet, while others were scentless. I discussed Burroughs’s observations, and mine, with my late, dear botanist friend Carol Gracie, and she wondered if the cause of the variation in scent was timing. On a hillside dotted with these plants, some, she speculated, might be farther along in flowering than others, and this could  account for some giving off dreamy aromas while others gave off, well, nothing.

Only a botanist would know by looking that hepaticas are close relations of buttercups. We think of buttercups as being yellow. The next time, or the first time, you spy a hepatica, picture in your mind’s eye petals not the color that you find them, but yellow. Then the kinship of the plant will begin to make sense.

An interesting feature of hepatica is the long-lasting nature of its leaves. While many of the early wildflowers of spring are informally called ephemerals because their stalks rise out of the leaf litter, unfurl blossoms, attract pollinators, make fruits, and then wither into virtual nonexistence, the leaves of hepatica hang around a full year. Through the winter they often appear a dull red, something like the color of raw liver. “Hepar,” root of the plant’s name, is Greek for liver. 

The job of every flower, or at least every flower with working female parts, is to produce what you might call a seed, a berry, or a nut — but botanists call a fruit. The fruits produced by hepatica flowers are tiny and might amount to nothing if not for a neat trick. Hepaticas produce seeds with tiny fat-rich organs attached to them. These accessories are called elaiosomes. Ants prize them, and because they do, the seeds are collected and brought back to nests. There the ants gorge on their fatty, energy-laden treats, while the hepatica seeds are left behind, essentially planted by the ants in soil fertilized by their droppings. It’s a win-win arrangement for plant and insect alike.