Bright White Delights on the Prairie

Bright colors aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

Need convinced? Hike the prairie and prairie savanna on a fine spring day in May and look for flashes of white. Among the blooms, you might see…

…the small white lady’s slipper orchids. After the seeds germinate, it takes almost a dozen years for the plant to produce flowers. No instant gratification here… but it’s worth the wait, isn’t it?

Frequent pollinators include this halictine bee. Almost as beautiful as the bloom.

Common valerian  looks anything but common. The blooms smell like dirty socks, but it appears its antsy visitors don’t mind the scent. As the flowers fade, the stalks turn bright pink. Who knew?

If you hike the prairie savanna nearby, you may stumble on a cluster of large-flowered trillium. Instinctively, you’ll drop to your knees to appreciate them more fully. Wow.

Whoever named “blue-eyed grass” had a sense of humor. It’s not in the grass family (rather, it’s an iris) and this particular species is not blue.  Despite its name, this “common blue-eyed grass” is uncommonly beautiful.

I have an affinity for violets, although my neighbors think of them as weedy trespassers. On the prairie, the common white violets line the trails. They rarely venture into the tallgrass arena, where they’d have to duke it out with tougher plants.

Smooth and false Solomon’s seal are starting to bloom in the savanna and in the shadier areas  of the prairie. But the real showstopper is starry Solomon’s seal, sprinkled through the grasses.

One of the first prairie plant names I learned was bastard toadflax, which colonizes large areas, dabbing the prairie with dots of white. Its seeds were once a tasty trail snack, when eaten in small amounts, for hungry Native Americans on the move.

Even the lone dandelion that blooms unwelcomed by the trail puts on a colorless, star-like show. Love ’em or hate ’em, the dandelion has its own ethereal beauty as it throws its starred seeds to the wind.

Sure, it’s no lady’s slipper.

But even dandelion seeds take on a bit of bright white glamour on a fine spring day in May. Why not take an hour  or two and go see for yourself?

All photos copyright Cindy Crosby at the Schulenberg Prairie and Savanna, The Morton Arboretum, Lisle, IL (top to bottom): small white lady’s slipper orchids (Cypripedium candidum), small white lady’s slipper orchids with halictine bee (Cypripedium candidum), common valerian (Valeriana edulis var. ciliata), large-flowered trillium (Trillium grandiflorum),  white blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium albidum), white violet (Viola blanda), starry Solomons seal (Maianthemum stellatum), bastard toadflax (Comandra umbellata),  dandelion (Taraxacum officinale),  small white lady’s slipper orchid (Cypripedium candidum).