For the Love of Spring Ephemerals
- Sue Hand
- Apr 15
- 3 min read
Spring comes quietly in the forest. Ice thaws. A bird calls tentatively. A bud pops. A sliver of green pushes up. The air is cool, sometimes cold, yet a few warm, sunny days entice the sojourner. My longtime dear friend, fellow artist, and traveling buddy, 93 year Roberta Schmied, leads me on a guided tour of spring ephemerals in Gamelands 57 InSide the Back Mountain outside of Noxen. Roberta is a walking encyclopedia of botanical information and she especially loves spring ephemerals! She can casually identify squirrel corn, Jack-In-the-Pulpit, trillium, bloodroot, hepatica, May apples, bluebells, trout lily, Dutchman’s breeches, foam flower, skunk cabbage, and more.
Spring ephemerals are fleeting, frail, energized from below the surface. They flower, set their seed, provide food sources for insects and wildlife, and go dormant before the heavy forest canopy develops. Their vibrancy is short.
So was Noxen’s. Once a beehive of activity in the days of railroads, trains, and their active tannery, the streets were laid out by Ziba Sickler, the original owner of the 50 acres of flats surrounded by picturesque scenery. The railroad reached beyond Noxen to Stull, now a ghost town, and beyond. Noxen and Stull have become the gateway to one of the most beautiful gameland areas in Pennsylvania, an artist’s dream environment.
I love to paint, especially outside on location. But there are limitations to what can be accomplished en plein air, especially in woodlands. Sun and clouds play games with light and colors. As the sun moves across the sky, shadows from multiple trees are observably variable every 10-15 minutes, making forest still lifes virtually impossible to paint realistically on location. We artists are blessed to live in an era when cameras are so easy to use! We can capture a moment of time in less than a second! In the Victorian era, the study of nature was popular, but plants had to be dug up and birds sometimes had to be killed and stuffed to provide time to draw or paint them. Today, with a common cell phone camera, a reference photo can be immediate. That reference, however, is never perfect! So these watercolor paintings of spring ephemerals were created inside my studio, tweaked and “photoshopped” with my paintbrush!
Hepatica, one of the earliest ephemerals, is a short woodland perennial which likes to grow where it can remain undisturbed for years. I enjoyed it as a child on our hillside near Orange. An evergreen herb, it likes sunshine and moisture in the spring and shade in the summer. The flowers can be white, pink, blue, or purple, with 5-12 petals on a single hairy stalk. Like water lilies, hepatica possess a characteristic called nyctinasty, which means they can close during rainy days and at night to protect them from cold and loss of moisture.
The trout lily has always been rare, and expansion of urban development into the countryside is its greatest threat. Their leaves are mottled gray-green-brown and resemble the coloring of brook trout. Trout lilies are adaptable in that they can grow in full sun or dappled shade but they require evenly moist, rich soil which abounds near Bowmans Creek. It’s a non-invasive slow grower. Believe it or not, some colonies of trout lily plants have been documented to last from 200-300 years! However, only a few plants will flower any given year and some never will. Their pollinators include bees and beetles, and they provide food for deer and black bears. As a spring ephemeral, they are only above ground for a month or so, but can usually be found in the company of spring beauties, Dutchman’s breeches, or trillium.
If you get close-up and personal to red trillium, they smell like rotten meat! Also called Stinking Benjamin for their odor and Wake-robin for their time of appearing, they bloom at the end of April or the beginning of May. Its pollinators are green flesh flies in search of rotting meat on which to lay their eggs. Although trillium does not close the deal for the flies, still they can enjoy a good meal of pollen as well as assisting the plants' procreation!
Springtime is short and precious. So is life. Before her untimely passing, our beautiful and beloved founding publisher, Clare McCarthy Parkhurst wrote in her last editorial for InSide the Back Mountain, “Make the most of what’s left of winter before we have the wonderful experience of Spring once again.” I think it would be a great honor to a great lady to do just that. Will you join me in my season of honoring Clare’s memory?
This article originally appeared in the April 2025 publication of InSide the Back Mountain.
