Wildflowers
Searching for mushrooms
When days get warmer, fungus hunters get ready to root out the wily morel.
Deep down, every morel hunter believes in divine providence.
There's nothing so providential as baskets overflowing with morels, and the taste is so divine hunters dream about it all winter. In spring, they offer a fervent prayer to the mushroom gods: May the fungus be among us.
Morels do taste heavenly. But it's the hunt that's so addictive — it's fun to find something for free that's so expensive in stores and restaurants, and it's fun to beat the odds by finding something so notoriously elusive.
15 great spring hikes
The scenery along these lovely trails will put a spring in your step.
What's so great about hiking in spring? That's easy – there's so much to see.
Move your feet in any direction and you'll run across wildflowers, waterfalls and, best of all, sweeping views that last only until the trees leaf out.
Head out before summer makes its brash appearance, with walls of greenery and fleets of bugs.
Wallowing in wildflowers
In 12 tried-and-true spots, you'll find a profusion of blooms.
When delicate spring wildflowers appear, it means winter finally is over.
No wonder we love them so much. But they're ephemeral — here today, gone tomorrow.
So if you want a good dose of them, head for a place where you know they'll be.
Spring in Door County
On this Wisconsin peninsula, a vast array of wildflowers rewards those weary of winter.
Goldthread and gaywings. Bogbean and trailing arbutus. In Wisconsin's Door County, it's enough to make a naturalist hyperventilate.
Cherry blossoms and daffodils are the showiest spring flowers on this tourist playground between Lake Michigan and Green Bay. But it's the wildflowers, many of them rare, that provide the most joyous proof that spring has arrived.
On sandy ridges, the first flower spotted often is the once-common trailing arbutus, whose waxy white blossoms emerge in April.
Where to find spring wildflowers
Some can be seen everywhere; others are more elusive.
Here are just a few of the best places to look for wildflowers.
Minnesota's scientific and natural areas (SNAs) also are very good
places to find unusual flowers, as are Wisconsin's state natural areas. For
more, see Spring in full glory.
Nature Conservancy sites host many interesting plants. Wildlife refuges, nature preserves and environmental learning centers also are good places to look.
Itching for spring
It's coming, in all its glorious bounty. Here's what to watch for and where to go.
When the snow is gone, the fun begins.
Most of us would be happy to see something, anything, that’s green. But there’s no reason to wait for that before going outdoors.
This is the best time to hunt for agates on Great Lakes beaches, where winter storms have tossed up a new batch of rocks. If you wait until July, when most tourists arrive, they’ll be picked over.
Outdoors in the Kickapoo Valley
In Wisconsin's coulee country, a green zone is known for morels, apples, wildflowers and a winding river.
In the coulees of southwest Wisconsin, a lush green zone draws anyone who craves a heady dose of nature.
It starts in spring, when trilliums bloom along Rustic Roads, morel mushrooms pop out on hillsides and water rushes down the crooked Kickapoo River.
It's not close to any city, but people find their way. Norwegians were first to be drawn to its deep, narrow valleys, like miniature fjords.
Braking for blooms
In late summer and early fall, you'll find the best array of wildflowers on bicycle trails.
In late summer and early fall, bicycle trails burst with blooms.
They're a favorite habitat for wildflowers because they’re on disturbed ground and have open, sunny edges. Many trails skirt lakes and bogs, but since most are on old rail lines, fires sparked by passing trains created openings for prairie species, too.
Take the Paul Bunyan State Trail past Lake Bemidji in northern Minnesota. One side is lined with water-loving plants — Joe-Pye weed, jewelweed and swamp milkweed, beloved by butterflies and bees (pictured).
Stalking summer wildflowers
Blooms paint the landscape in every color under the sun.
In summer, you don’t have to hunt wildflowers.
They’re big and splashy, blooming by the thousands on prairie, along bicycle trails and anywhere there’s sun. When everything else is green, they give us pops of color: the purple of bottle gentian, the orange of hawkweed, the yellow of tansy.
Do you like Monet’s paintings of Giverny? Then you’ll love the meadows of blue vervain and Queen Anne’s lace on the southwestern Minnesota prairie, the swaths of pearly everlasting and red bunchberry on the Keweenaw Peninsula and the fields of sunflower and blazing star along the Waters of the Dancing Sky scenic byway in northern Minnesota.
Wildflowers of the North Shore
On the shores of Lake Superior, delicate blooms mark the return of warmth.
In spring, not that many people go to the North Shore to see the flowers.
They’re small, and the rest of the scenery is big and distracting — roaring waterfalls, jagged cliffs and that mesmerizing inland sea that fills the horizon.
If you do look down, you’ll find them huddled in cracks on lava flows, tucked along hiking trails and in boggy patches along streams. They’re dainty, but many are fairly unusual — butterwort as well as bluebells, rock clematis along with columbine.
Chasing spring wildflowers
On a road trip into the Mississippi River Valley, see the region's best array of blooms.
In May, the woods are full of people on the hunt.
Some are stalking morel mushrooms. Others are trying to bag a turkey or spot a rare warbler.
The rest of us are content to chase wildflowers. For one thing, we’re guaranteed success.
Tiptoeing through the toothwort
With their cameras, nature-lovers try to capture the fleeting joys of spring.
Nothing is more exhilarating than the first days of spring, when the air practically vibrates with the pent-up vigor of growing things.
Warm sunlight filters down through budding forests, and the rich smell of humus wafts up from their floors. Then, amid the decaying leaves and grasses, we find the first spring ephemerals.
They gladden our hearts, those brave little blooms. But they come, and then they go.
Spring in full glory
For a piece of quiet, visit a state natural area.
One spring, I hit the nature-lover's jackpot, almost without trying.
Exploring a septet of Minnesota's scientific and natural areas, or SNAs, I found more pasque flowers in bloom than I'd ever
expected to see in a lifetime.
I saw a panorama of the Mississippi as the Dakota would have seen it 200 years ago. I walked under the budding canopies of old-growth forests and listened to choruses of courting frogs.
Spring in western Wisconsin
Near Menomonie, a log house is headquarters for hiking, mushroom-hunting and bicycling.
Every year, the wily morel eludes me.
Living in the city doesn’t help. So one May, I rented a house on 160 acres in western Wisconsin and brought four pairs of eyes to help me look.
We’d just arrived at the Log House in the Forest near Spring Valley and were sitting on the patio when a man emerged from the forest and presented us with two fat morels. It was owner Tom Genz, so we quizzed him on technique.
© Beth Gauper, 2007 - 2013 all rights reserved
