Spring wildflowers offer no-effort garden beauty

For gardeners, spring is a busy time. I spend most of May and at least 75% of June feeling perpetually behind in my garden tasks. The to-do list becomes a what-haven’t-I-done-yet list.

And yet for all those undone jobs, the garden always manages to look pretty good. I take no credit for that.

The unsung, oft-forgotten heroes of the spring garden are the charming ephemerals that just take care of themselves. These spring wildflowers, most of which planted themselves in my garden without any input from me, pop up, bloom and then simply disappear.

Their flowers almost always demand that you stop to appreciate them, as they are not nearly as flashy as the in-your-face highly bred plants gardeners purposely plant. Some, like Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica), have flowers that are so small — dime-sized at best — they are best appreciated at eye level in a fully prone position, should you happen to find yourself there after a particularly onerous day in the garden.

Trout lily foliage (I have the yellow variety, Erythronium americanum) is so prolific in my yard that it is almost a nuisance. That is until I spot one in flower, a tricky thing to do as the downward-facing flowers expose the backs of the petals, which are burgundy and tend to blend in. It’s also a rarity as it take about eight years for trout lilies to be mature enough to flower.

There are others that are less bashful, such as the sunshine yellow flowers of marsh marigolds (Caltha palustris), which are only found along streams or swamps.

And then there are the most elegant of spring ephemerals — trilliums. Although there are many varieties, and I confess to planting several of them, Trillium grandiflorum will always be my favorite. The three-petaled, snow-white flower oozes simple sophistication. When it is happy, it will colonize, and there can be few more glorious occurrences than coming across a patch of trilliums in the woods.

Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica), which I have allowed to take over much of my garden, are not as stunning as trilliums, but what they lack in sophistication they make up for enthusiasm with their shriveled pink flower buds that turn into, well, blue bells. They are the perfect complement to daffodils, and perhaps their best quality is that they don’t mind the unceremonious chopping I give them the moment they stop blooming. Most plants will not tolerate such treatment, but Virginia bluebells seem to understand that the garden needs to move on without them.

I can’t imagine the garden without any of these old friends that manage to make the garden shine even when the gardener is busy making work lists. They will fade into the background as the main players in the garden grow, but I’ll look forward to seeing them next year, when I’ll still have too much to do in the garden.