Look past spring’s show for subtle beauties

David Bare
Media General News Service
Published: April 30, 2008

The landscape in early and mid-spring is painted with flowers. There are few scenes that aren’t drenched in flowers. Some seem to scream at us from the tree branches and shrub borders - blinding azaleas and pink dogwoods; subtlety is not their strong suit. Wisterias are literally dripping color from the trees. Every green thing wants to flower at this time of year, and many go unnoticed as the siren call of redbuds follows the fading drum roll of tulip and daffodil.

I would trade in a dozen of those brilliant fuchsia-red azaleas for just one fothergilla. This little, honey-scented shrub has creamy white bottlebrush flowers on essentially bare branches. A little later its leaves will unfold their pleats, rough and leathery; they are related to the witch hazels that give us late-autumn or winter flowers, depending on the species. Like the witch hazels, fothergilla’s autumn color is among the best of any deciduous plant.

This is the time of year to go poking around in the woods, where ferns are busy unfurling, and many flowers have already shed their petals and fallen broken to the ground. You don’t get that sort of bullhorn announcement that it is spring in the woods; rather, you are nudged with gentle reminders. The flowers here are all the sweeter for their subtlety.

I was reminded of this on a recent hike along a stream near Pilot Mountain. There, tiny bluets lit up the trail in the sunny spots where they love to congregate. These four-petaled flowers are palest sky blue and about the size of Lincoln’s head on the penny. They are borne on the end of thread-thin stems. Nearby were rue anemones, tiny white windflowers that the smallest breeze animates. You rarely encounter these two in gardens. They are both fleeting spring ephemerals, gone almost as quickly as they come and both wanting moist woodland soils. If you have the space to devote to tiny whispers of plants, these two deserve planting, but I can’t imagine any gardener as masterful as the hand that scattered them artfully in the woods.

Ferns were unrolling in the hundreds on my walk just as they are in the garden. I’ve always thought that the architecture of unrolling fiddleheads was just as beautiful as the unfurling of any flower. Few things are more evocative of spring reawakening than the unraveling of ferns spirals on stalks arranged in a circle. Some are covered in dense scales as if they were clothed in fur. Some arise as thick as pencils, and others are as slender as lengths of string. They may be gold, silver, purple or red, but they are invariably fascinating and best viewed close up, another reason to get some weeding done in the shade garden.

Another plant that can easily go unnoticed in the season of over-the-top flowering is the jack in the pulpit. There are many species of these, though they are most often relegated to the gardens of collectors. We have only two species in the East - the jack in the pulpit - Arisaema triphyllum, and the much less common green dragon Arisaema dracontium. There is so much variation in the jack in the pulpit, though, that it is sometimes hard to believe it is the same plant. Jacks have individual stalks that sprout stems with three leaves (tri-phyllum) on each side and a green, hood-like “flower” in the center.

The hood may be striped in white and green or liver purple, or it may be solid green. Inside, a little column, like a clapper in a bell, carries the miniscule male and female flowers. If they are pollinated they will develop into a cluster of seeds that change from glossy green to orange and finally to an autumn-scarlet red. By that time the leaves will have withered and the stalk bearing its brilliant seeds aloft will be all that remains of jack and his pulpit.

Jack in the pulpit has the ability to change its sex in order to conserve energy in times of stress. It takes a lot of energy to produce seeds, so in such situations as last year’s drought the plant will revert to producing all male flowers and save the energy it would have spent on reproduction.

The more exotic, Asian species of Arisaema are becoming a little easier to find in the market. Some of these are quite impressive with whip-like tails, boldly striped hoods and immense leaves; they are endlessly fascinating sculptural oddities of the spring garden.

Some woodland plants are so subtle that you have to go looking for them, or they will never appear. The wild gingers are like that. Their flowers, often called “little brown jugs”, are hidden down in their crowns where ants and beetles, but little else, are likely to find them. Here in the South you can find related plants under the botanical names of Hexastylis and Asarum. Some have fuzzy, deep-green, heart-shaped leaves and some leathery leaves that are mottled in silver. Both have weird little triangular, liver-colored flowers that bloom right at ground level and require some poking about in the leaf crown to find.

They are not what you would call pretty, but they are curious and strange. They are pollinated by flies and possibly beetles. After pollination a little fleshy structure surrounding the seed that ants find particularly tasty encourages ants to take the seed down into their holes, where it effectively becomes planted. Wild ginger, it seems, has it all worked out.

A different kind of beauty is found in the appreciation of these small things mired in complexity and intricate relation to the rest of their environment. While the spring color riot rages, don’t miss the grace unfolding at your feet.

n If you have a gardening question or story idea, write to David Bare in care of Features, Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27101-3159, or send e-mail to his attention to.

gardening @wsjournal.com.