Boundaries
by Jack Nisbet

Jack Nisbet is the author of The Mapmaker's Eye, Sources of the River, Purple Flat Top, Singing Grass, Burning Sage and Visible Bones. His newest, The Collector, is due out in October.

Wake Robin
April 2008

As Scottish horticulturist David Douglas padded around Kettle Falls in the spring of 1826, he was delighted to find western white trillium blooming in moist peaty soils beneath a copse of birch trees. The site was quite possibly on lower Pinkney Creek, where the flower, also called wake-robin because of its early appearance, may still be found today. Douglas certainly agreed with legendary Missoula naturalist Klaus Lackschewitz, who called the plant "perhaps the most elegant spring wildflower in our area."

There are many kinds of trillium that thrive in North American forests, all of them recognizable by a distinct pattern of three leaves around the stem and three petals defining the flower. The western white is a particularly tall, long-stemmed version, with a single large flower. The creamy white blossoms attract a host of insects for the work of pollination, including sap, rove, and long-horned beetles, at least two kinds of bumble bees, honey bees, crab spiders, and nocturnal geometer moths. After the fertile dust is spread around, the flowers fade to delicate shades of lilac; some botanists believe this might be a signal to the insects that their work is complete.

Trilliums only reproduce from sprouted seeds, never vegetatively, so the seed cycle is essential to the survival of the species. Each small, green, berry-like globe that follows a blossom comes marked with a straight line and coated with a sticky oil mass that attracts foraging insects. Chief among these are yellow jackets and ants, who carry seeds away in an effective dispersal system. Yellow jackets fly some of them considerable distances, but then scatter them in random places where only a few will sprout. Ants provide a closer, more dependable alternative: after licking off all the nutritious oil, worker ants deposit the trillium seeds in their colony trash pile, which often provides a perfect situation for germination.

Tarn Ream of Missoula has studied white trillium in western Montana for nearly a decade. She finds flowers blooming in April and May in lush cedar-grand fir habitats that swim with running water year around, much as David Douglas saw them near Fort Colvile. But Ream also tracks trillium in forests of lodgepole and tamarack at up to six thousand feet of elevation in the Bitterroot and Swan Ranges. Even though these mountains are quite dry in the summer, the flowers thrive by peeking up just behind the melting snow, blooming and setting seed fast, then dying back when hot days turn their oasis into bare rocky ground.

Both boggy and montane populations have to fight hard to survive. The setting of seeds can be disrupted by late snow and hard hailstorms. Deer nipping at the lush spring leaves rob the root of necessary sugars, so that the life of the plant withers away. The same deer, browsing later in the season, can snip off developing seed heads. Small rodents snatch some of the seeds as they ripen, killing any chance of germination.

ReamÕs study plots show that individual western white trillium, especially on our side of the mountains, grow at an agonizingly slow rate. Sprouted trilliums live in a one-leafed non-reproductive stage for years as they mature. In greenhouses, they might show three leaves after a decade, but Ream has found wild trillium with dime-sized single leaves that are 15 years old. She tracked another three-leafed plant that produced its first flower after 19 years.

Ream can read the history of these plants without disturbing them because each trillium sends out a single rhizomal root that grows down, then sideways in the shape of the letter "L." Every year when the plant sends up a shoot, it constricts the outside of the rhizome and forms a distinct ring (You can see a similar process in your garden iris). Wielding a garden trowel and a lot of patience, Ream gently removes just enough dirt to follow a single plantÕs root line from stem to tip. She dribbles a little water on top to clean it off, then leans over with a magnifying glass and counts the constrictions. She has counted up to sixty rings on some healthy plants, even though the thick, blunt tip of the root indicates that years of early stem scars must have rotted off.

The root rings might be compared to the buttons on a rattlesnakeÕs tail, which provide a fair idea of the most recent run of the snakeÕs life, but no indication of its earliest stages. A researcher in Oregon has counted 72 rings on one trillium root, and Ream figures the blunt ends of some older plants might represent another 20 years of life. So without making too big of a deal about it, she is involved in a long-term study of an organism that reaches sexual maturity in its teens and can live for eight decades or more.

Trilliums have long been gathered in small amounts by North American tribes for a variety of medicinal applications that include treatment of skin ailments, childbirth complications, and especially eye problems. In the 1970s, Okanagan tribal elder Annie York told University of British Columbia ethnologist Nancy Turner how she had been taught to use trillium. The root was carefully dug in the fall, when the leaves had died completely away. After cleaning and drying the preserved rootstock, a fine powder was scraped into a collection vessel, ready to use. In the old days, healers would blow this powder off their finger or palm directly into sore eyes; in more recent times tribal physicians mixed the root dust with water and dropped it in with an eyedropper. These methods also worked to draw out irritating foreign objects from the eyes.

Annie York made it clear that she considered trillium to be an extremely valuable plant, one that should only be handled or touched by someone well trained in the disciplines of tribal medicine. Anyone "fooling around" with it risked personal harm.

David Douglas, who had a green thumb as far as getting plants to live and grow, collected specimens and seeds of western white trillium for the London Horticultural Society around Fort Colvile in 1826. The seeds sprouted with surprising vigor, and this trillium, along with many cultivars, remains a popular garden plant in England to this day. But trillium in the wild might not be in such a stable situation.

The abundance of western white trillium witnessed by David Douglas two centuries ago has been severely reduced by habitat loss, harvesting the young leaves for greens, and taking the whole plant for medicinal or garden use. Tarn ReamÕs study plots indicate that most populations of trillium exist in a state of slow decline. Herbalists in Montana are alarmed enough at the reduction of wild trillium that they helped to place it on a list of protected plants.

Garden enthusiasts should remember that the way David Douglas introduced trillium to England still works best: watch the plants, collect ripe seeds before the ants do, and take good care of them over the winter. The seeds will sprout after one or two extended exposures to cold. In any case, if you stumble across a trillium this spring in the woods -- whether you are down low or up high -- treat the flower gently. It may be your elder.

Illustration by Emily Nisbet.

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