Herewith I am continuing to create a list of the plants, especially the flowering plants, in Minnehaha Park.
Spring ephemerals are those plants which burst into bloom right quick before the trees leaf out.
The Bloodroot is one of the plants that shows up in early spring, then disappears by early summer. Known as Sanguinaria canadensis, it is rather poisonous. It seems so shy of flowering as it comes up.
The single leaf unfurls and the blossom opens.
Trillium grandiflorum is also called the wake robin. In Minneapolis the robins are thoroughly woke long before the trillium blossoms, but perhaps the name refers to one of those timing things, like picking morels when the lilac leaves are the size of a squirrel’s ear.
The cutleaf toothwort or Cardamine concatenata. I had to ask the Internet hive mind what this was. There are large patches of it below the creek at Minnehaha.
In many places in the park, the false rue anemone (or Enemion biternatum) is found commingled with the cutleaf toothwort or other plants.
I really expected the Latin name for the false rue anemone to have something like “aquilegifolium” in it, to indicate that the leaves look like columbine. But what do I know, anyway.
If you took a whole lot of longish, thinnish leaves and stuck them stem down in the ground, it would look like a great carpet of trout lily, Erythronium albidum. The blooms are so relatively infrequent that they appear as a marvelous surprise.
The spring rains have continued to make the lower reaches of the park a soggy mess. The water is much higher than it was 10 days ago.
There’s no one wading across to reach the railings and the other side of the creek on a day when the creek is this high. On the upstream (right) side, there’s a streak of white foam where the water is backed up, unable to flow under the bridge.
Though the water is obviously higher than I saw on April 16th, there were signs that it had receded. The wet mud next to the floodwaters had lots of animal prints in it.
I thought I saw raccoon prints, too, but perhaps they were dog prints. I am not much of a tracker.
I didn’t see who made these prints, but I have seen mallards in the creek near here.
There are a couple of large and lovely colonies of marsh marigolds, Caltha palustris along the creek. Photographing them up close is tricky because they are in such very wet conditions. And there is so much buckthorn between the path and the marshy spots that its hard to photograph them from afar, too.
Asarum canadense or the wild ginger is not food, so do not eat. This is an easy to grow garden plant. Was surprised to read that it is threatened in Maine.
A very useful Minnesota wildflower identification site has 183 sedges listed. Perhaps I’ll figure out which one this is some day.
(The complete list, in alphabetical order.)