Ozark Spring Wildflowers
This is most highly anticipated time of the year for wildflower lovers. You’ve experienced the drab of winter browns and greys, and now color is starting to return to the forests. You mostly must look close to the ground in relatively rich woods to see the best of our spring wildflowers.
Among the first to pop up are the white to violet to blue blossoms of American liverleaf or hepatica (Hepatica americana). The flowers appear before the new leaf growth although often the distinctly three-lobed, leathery, liver-shaped leaves persist from the previous year.
In the same habitat you will see a shrub with a dark, smooth bark, and tiny yellow flowers tightly hugging the branches. Pinch a flower cluster or two, rub them between your fingers and smell them. It’s likely spicebush (Lindera benzoin), one of two members of the laurel family in our area (the other is sassafras).
It’s a mostly tropical plant family that gives us familiar aromatic woody plants such as cinnamon and bay leaves. Hopefully, you didn’t mistake these flowers for those of poison ivy… this shows the importance of plant identification, a challenging but rewarding task.
Other common plants flowering now include bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis), a member of the poppy family, whose white flowers also appear before the distinctively irregularly round-lobed leaves. Of the 46 or so species of Trillium, six occur here in the Ozarks, the most common of which is Trillium sessile, so named because its individual leaves, in a whorl of three, are stalkless (sessile in botanical parlance). Its maroon flowers make it one of the more attractive of spring wildflowers. We also have rarer and unusual species such as the unique Ozark trillium (Trillium ozarkanum). And this is just the beginning
There are several books that will help you identify spring wildflowers in the Ozarks. Among my favorites are Thomas Hemmerly’s Ozark Wildflowers (University of Georgia Press, 2002), Don Kurtz’s Ozark Wildflowers (Falcon Publishing, Inc., 1999), Carl G. Hunter’s Wildflowers of Arkansas (The Ozark Society Foundation, 1984). Bo Brown’s new Foraging the Ozarks (Falcon Guides, 2020) will also help you look at the flora in a new way and open-up the possibility of exploring plants as wild foods.
Joining the Arkansas Native Plant Society will also expand your botanical horizons (anps.org).