Spring wildflowers

It was cool and rainy today, but spring's pace is steady. The early spring wildflowers are out at Station Cove, a premier wildflower site in Upstate South Carolina.

The latest include Trillium cuneatum (Little Sweet Betsy), Thalictrum thalictroides (Rue Anemone), and Podophyllum peltatum (Mayapple).

Hepatica flowers are already developing fruits and new leaves emerging.

The fiddleheads of one of the common ferns were also striking. It was a nice spring outing.

A first spring wildflower

Many garden flowers bloom early in the Southeastern US (cued to different climatic conditions).

Most of them are native to the Mediterranean region. Daffodils come from Spain and Portugal. Crocus are native to the mountains of Southern Europe (Greece, Turkey, Crete and elsewhere). Tulips are native in the mountains of Central Asia (Eastern Turkey and the foothills of the Himalayas). Flowering apricots come from Asia, too.

But our native woodland wildflowers start blooming in late February and early March.

The earliest are Hepatica. Hepatica americana is blooming now in the Garden. In the last couple of years, we saw the first flowers on Feb. 22 and Feb. 29. So it's delayed this year. My gardening companion had looked for flowers of Hepatica last week in his plant ecology lab.

And the trout lilies (Erythronia americana) are well along.