The triliums were out and blooming all over the place.
There are about a zillion types of trilliums. I think these are the trillium ovatum or the white trillium. It's also called the white wake-robin (I like this one best) from a myth that its spring emergence wakes red-breasted birds into raptures of song. I found a great article about them if you are interested. I had heard something about picking them makes them not bloom again for 7 years, so I went and looked it up. Here's what I found out:
While it is often said that the gathering of the flower stems results in the plant’s death--or delays the plant re-blooming for something like 7 years--such stories are not really true. However, picking the whole plant: flowers and leaves, besides denying others the enjoyment of the flower’s beauty, does rob the plant’s underground rhizome of needed, and ongoing accumulation of carbohydrates. Still if a particular Trillium is regularly picked early on, and over successive years, like anything else, its long term survival would be impaired.
In reference to these fabled warnings against picking, but rather unexpectedly described in a technical botanical text Vascular Plants of the Pacific NW: “If the admonition was invented to discourage picking of the flowers, the statement should be that the picker, not the picked, will die--but justice rarely is so obvious.”
While this notion may seem a bit harsh, in fact some western Indian cultures did have such strict warnings. The Thompson Indians of British Columbia used Western Trillium medicinally, with informers telling researchers that Trillium ovatum “should never be touched except by those experienced in medicine.” Thompson native, Annie York stated that Trillium “is an extremely valuable plant and that should never be pulled or touched by someone who does not know what he is doing, or who is ‘just fooling around,’ or some harm would come to him.”Good thing I just took some pictures, isn't it?
All that green you see in the pictures is from some kind of clover-type plant. It has tiny pink flowers sometimes. I know there is other stuff in there, but I have no idea what it is. I'm bad with plants by trying to learn. Maybe a plant guide would help.
Anyway, here are some more pictures of the park and Carmen and Ochenta. It's hard to get a good picture of Ochenta with my cell phone as she is always in motion and won't hold still long enough for the shutter to close before she moves again. I have a zillion blurry pictures of her and another zillion of her butt. Carmen is a much better model.
