By Joyce Arleen Corson
Guest Columnist

Striped squill

SYRACUSE — Flowers are single, or in a raceme of two or three flowers at the top of a slender naked stem. Each flower is about 1 inch across when fully open, has six flaring blue petals with a darker blue stripe down the center and six white stamens with dark blue tips. The flowers are somewhat bell-shaped when not fully open. Other cultivars of this species may have white, pink or blue-violet flowers.

Spring ephemerals are perennial woodland wildflowers which develop aerial parts (i.e. stems, leaves and flowers) of the plant early each spring and then quickly boom and produce seed. The leaves often wither leaving only underground structures (i.e. roots, rhizomes and bulbs) for the remainder of the year. This strategy is very common in herbaceous communities of deciduous forests as it allows small herbaceous plants to take advantage of the high levels of sunlight reaching the forest floor prior to the formation of a canopy of woody plants. Examples include: spring beauties, trilliums, harbinger of spring and the genus of dicentra particularly D. cucullaria, Dutchman’s breeches and D. canadensis, squirrel corn.

In the herb layer of beech forest and hornbeam-sessile oak forest, tuberous, bulbous and rhizomous plants are abundant. They comprise the spring geophytes (tuberous, bulbous and rhizomous).

These appear to be perennial because they do come back year after year although squill do “seed off.” The seeds can stay quiet until after the frost date in Indiana. They can also wait until the temp is 75 plus degrees to sprout.

All plants produce seeds but plants can grow from severed roots as well and mud bottom plants can grow roots from leaf tissue.

Believe it or not it’s still spring and we haven’t even talked about biennials and their tricks!