Early Golden Lily

Trout Lily (Erythronium americanum)

In Spring, something akin to an invisible rosary or a mala rests in the palm of my hand and in my thoughts too, tiny beads which form a litany of Spring wildflowers and the order in which they will appear in the rocky landscape of the Lanark Highlands. The Trout Lily is one of the first beads on my invisible rosary, a delicate nodding flower I look forward to every year as one of the early bloomers to appear on the scene in this northern place where Winter arrives early, hangs around forever and takes its time about leaving.

How to describe the woods at this time of year. . . . There is the rich fragrance of good dark earth and the spice of fallen leaves - there is the green tang of new leaves popping into view on my favourite birch tree and the cottony scent of myriad catkins flinging themselves to the four winds in an effort to propogate themselves. The water coming up in the spring in the woods smells and tastes of the limestone it travelled through on its way to the surface, and it makes a dancing sound as it runs down the hill into the valley.

Close to the spring and tucked among the fallen leaves are the delicate blooms of the golden Trout Lily, a small curvaceous species which makes its home among the rich moist hardwood groves of eastern Ontario. The mottled green and purple leaves are some of the first leaves to appear in a landscape where the trees have not yet leafed out, where there is scant shade and last autumn's bleached and papery leaves form a deep carpet on the forest floor.

The Trout Lily is known by various names here, and the names delineate interesting characteristics seen and unseen: call it Trout Lily for its mottled green and purple leaves resembling the scales on the flanks of a Brook Trout, call it Adder’s Tongue for the likeness of its emerging leaves to a snake's pointed tongue, call it Fawn Lily for the similarity of those leaves to the long ears of a newborn fawn, call it Dogtooth Violet (erroneously) for the white toothy shape of the corm with which it proliferates so efficiently.

It is always a pleasure to discover little blooms of the Trout Lily in the woods. The leaves of the plant are unusual, its petals narrow, brightly coloured and furling gracefully upward like a Turkish cap to display the brighter yellow of its inside parts. A true sun worshipper, the Trout Lily turn on its stem to follow the passage of the sun through the day, and once established, colonies live for centuries — if there are Trout Lilies in the woods, chances are that they are older than many of the trees growing nearby.