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Wildflower season: A fast start in a very short race

• John Lorson: The Rail Trail Naturalist
• April 18, 2020
• 973

Here’s a really easy way to visualize what it’s like to be a forest wildflower in Ohio:

First, imagine you are a 4-year-old child standing on the edge of a big circle drawn on the ground. You look around the circle to a half-dozen of your preschool classmates, standing basket in hand just like you. When a whistle blows, all of you step into the circle and begin picking up treats — a chocolate egg here, a bag of jelly beans there, maybe even a packet of marshmallow peeps. Life is great! You’ve got a whole field full of treats and only a handful of friends in the hunt to fill their baskets.

But after a minute or two, the whistle blows again, and this time a whole mess of older, faster and taller kids dash into the circle. Now you’re racing to pick up what you can while you can before the big kids snatch up everything. Before long you make your way back out of the circle with your treats and vow that next year you’re going to come back and be ready to grab up everything you can the moment that whistle blows.

The analogy is pretty straightforward: You and the rest of your preschool “wildflower” pals show up first at the party and have a shot at the greatest quantity of treasure — which in the plant world is the sunlight available to be used in photosynthesis. Because most of Ohio has historically been covered with a thick canopy of deciduous trees, the only period of truly abundant sunlight on the forest floor has always been in early springtime before the tall trees (oak, beech, maple, hickory and the like) leaf out and swallow up the vast majority of the solar energy before it ever makes it to the ground.

What this means for wildflowers is that now is the time to get things done. What it means for you and me is that right now is prime time to see some of Ohio’s most beautiful woodland residents — the spring wildflowers.

A consistent truth of nature is that if there’s a resource available, over time organisms are going to compete for it. In a mature ecosystem like Ohio’s forested lands, that competition eventually reaches a state of balance. A tiny wildflower isn’t much competition for a giant tree, but that tree started out in the same place as the flower — in the soft moist duff of the forest floor.

Fortunately for us, once the initial “turf war” is fought between the “baby” spring beauty and the “infant” mighty oak, the tree quickly ascends to occupy an entirely different niche, and the canopy it helps create benefits the very wildflowers with which it once competed.

While sunlight might be limited at ground level for most of the growing season, moisture remains abundant in the shade, as do nutrients provided by decades of decaying leaves. The soil is protected from the impact and erosive effects of heavy rains by the umbrella of the canopy which also works to moderate the temperature in the woods. (Think about stepping into the forest on a hot July afternoon.)

And while some of Ohio’s spring wildflower species are fleeting ephemerals that vanish entirely in both leaf and stem once their moment in the sun has passed, others may remain green and productive for months beyond the period of blossom, taking every measure of advantage from the meager 10 percent of the sunlight that still makes it to the ground. In that regard the plants of the forest floor provide benefit for the trees as well, providing cover for nuts and seeds that fall from the canopy and might otherwise be eaten.

Many a child has learned his or her first lessons of the forest by experiencing the wildflowers of spring. Even as adults it’s always a wonderful lesson in resilience and renewal to get out to the woods at this time of year and watch the world come back to life. Now’s the time to get out there if you are so inclined. Ohio’s spring wildflowers will be gone before you know it.