#trillium erectum

[thebotanicalarcade]

n260_w1150 by Biodiversity Heritage Library Via Flickr: North American wild flowers. Washington, D.C. :Smithsonian Institution,1925.. biodiversitylibrary.org/page/42669869

[creativecommonsplants]

Red Trillium by Barbara Friedman on Flickr.

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0. 

[flowerishness]

Trillium ovatum and Trillium erectum (Pacific trillium and red trillium)

They say good things come in threes.

[mutant-distraction]

Bekky Honkala

Red trillium Trillium erectum Adirondack Park, New York

[notoverjoyed]

2 days late and several dollars short, here's my bit for Ectoberhaunt Day 7: Unearth!

Summary: Sam is collecting plants in the forest outside amity park. What she unearth reveals something terrible about one of her best friends.

Warnings: Descriptions of a corpse

As Sam trudges through the forest, she reluctantly admits that perhaps this wasn’t her brightest idea. She’d been assigned a project for her honors biology class, one where they could choose any topic and any format in which to deliver it (within reason of course). Naturally, Sam decided to make things difficult for herself.

On the list of native plants she’d tasked herself with finding in the forests outside Amity Park, this last one has proven most elusive. All she had to do was find it, draw it, and map it’s location. Then she could finally go home. The light escaping the canopy of trees above is just beginning to warm with the coming sunset.

“UuUUUgh,�� Sam groans loudly as her foot sinks into another hidden patch of mud. It had rained the day before as is typical of late April, and the shade of the trees had kept the ground from drying out. She yanks her boot from the muck and continues on. She’ll have to turn back soon enough, plant or no plant.

“Why the fucking Trillium?” she mutters to herself. The flower she’s looking for, Trillium erectum, is fairly common, currently blooming, and smells like death. Why is it so goddamn hard to find!

As if speaking had conjured the plant into existence, Sam catches a whiff of a promising carrion scent. It’s this distinctive scent that serves as a method of identifying this flower among it’s many relatives. She stops, and takes a deep breath. Her nose wrinkles at the smell as she tries to determine it’s direction.

“Yep, that smells dead to me,” she says to herself. To the right, she decides. That’s where the smell is coming from. She turns and walks that way slowly, keeping an eye out for the red or white petals she can expect with this flower.

As she picks her way through the brush, her next footfall is far deeper than she would expect, almost tipping her off her feet. It’s not mud this time; the ground was sunken in where loose dirt had compacted.

“What the fuck?” Sam yelps as she finds her balance. As she does so, she notices that the smell of death had gotten stronger. Much stronger.

“The fuck?” she says again, softly this time. There’s no sign of the flower she’s looking for, but the smell… Had she come across a dead animal. She steps back outside of the depression and dismisses the thought. Animals, after all, don’t bury their dead. The depression that nearly took her out is roughly big enough to be the settled soil on top of a hastily dug grave.

Now distracted from her task, she takes a step back and considers the apparent grave, barely noticing the carrion scent anymore. Should she call 911? She pulls out her phone, and snorts derisively at the screen. No service.

The only solution then is to make a note of her probable location and hike until she has service again. However… What if it really was an animal? If she called 911 over this her parents would have a fit, even if it was just an animal. It wouldn’t be worth the hassle if this was just nature at work.

“Nature with a shovel,” she mutters. No, she wouldn’t call 911. Not without making sure.

With the smell of dead body so strong, it’s probably a pretty shallow grave. She bends down and brushes away the very top layer of dirt with her hands. It had settled enough to form a depression, but it wasn’t compacted yet, so it comes away easily. She continues in this way, methodically moving the dirt aside. The light grows a deeper shade of amber, but she hardly notices.

After only a foot or so of digging, her hand brushes something other that dirt. It feels like fabric, and as she further unearths it, she can just barely see the color in the fading light. It’s white dirty with soil, with a red hem at the edge. It feels light, like cotton t-shirt fabric.

Her next touch feels like soft yet flaky flesh, and she recoils. Brushing her hand frantically on the grass next to her, she fumbles with her other had for her phone. Turning the flashlight on the ground below, she sees what the dim light had hidden before. A partially decayed elbow pokes out of the soil, dark as if it had been burned before being buried.

Well that’s it. It’s confirmed. She should call the police now, right. But she can’t help but wonder. That shirt looks so familiar… She props her phone on a tree root so that it points at the dirt below.

Very, very carefully, she brushes more dirt away, focusing on where the body above the elbow would be. She unearths more white fabric, and soon enough, more skin. This skin is less blackened than the skin at the elbow but she hardly notices. She’s distracted, because she sees hair. She must have reached the head. And that black hair looks familiar too.

Sam is hardly thinking at this point. Vague impressions cross her mind, of her friend who had grown more distant in the past months. And the ghosts that have recently begun plaguing the town.

She brushes more dirt away, and can hardly breathe. It's not every day you see one of your best friends face half decayed in the ground when you’d waved goodbye to them hours ago.

[wumbologyandecology]

Red Trillium (Trillium erectum L.) Thetford Hill, Vermont

[vandaliatraveler]

A few mementos from a short hike on the Virgin Hemlock Tail this morning. Cold, damp weather has settled into NC West Virginia, but any rain is welcome following an unusually dry winter and spring (opposite of the West Coast). From top: the ever balletic but stinky red trillium (Trillium erectum); long-spurred violet (Viola rostrata); wood anemone (Anemone quinquefolia), longing for a burst of sun to open its flowers; trailing arbutus (Epigaea repens), a ground-hugging shrub in the heath family; early meadow-rue (Thalictrum dioicum); and an Eastern red-backed salamander (Plethodon cinereus), a terrestrial salamander of rich, damp mountain woods.

[blackswallowtailbutterfly]

My Garden Flowers Part 8

All photos mine.

In order of appearance:

211. White Avens (Geum canadense) This was here before I got there and as she's native she survived the purge I did of the weeds.

212. Orange Coneflower (Rudbeckia fulgida) I didn't plant this, but she's in lots of places now and she's not always this orange, often leaning more toward amber, but she is always very pretty.

213. Tall White Lettuce (Prenanthes altissima) Not pictured as she hasn't flowered yet.

214. American Red Raspberry (Rubus strigosus) Not pictured as she hasn't flowered yet.

215. Canada mayflower (Maianthemum canadense) Not pictured as she hasn't flowered yet.

216. Barren Strawberry (Waldsteinia fragarioides) The leaves look a lot like strawberry leaves, the flowers look like if strawberry flowers were yellow, and they make a red berry! But it tastes woody and bland. Hence the name. I still want to make a jam of them if I ever get enough of them, though.

217. Tufted Hairgrass (Deschampsia ceaspitosa) Don't mind the bull thistle behind it that I wasn't able to remove, but the foliage of the grass is a nice blue-green and the flowers are, well, tufts.

218. Largeflower Bellwort (Uvularia grandiflora) The flowers are always bowed as if wilting. They're springtime flowers only.

219. Spotted Jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) One of the only two Impatiens species native this far north. The flowers of this one are orange. She likes moist to wet spots and can handle full sun to full shade.

220. Fringed Loosestrife (Lysimachia ciliata) Yellow flowers in summer, dark red leaves in autumn.

221. Thicket Creeper (Parthenocissus vitacea) Not pictured as she hasn't flowered yet.

222. Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) Not pictured as she hasn't flowered yet.

223. Black Cherry (Prunus nigra) Not pictured as I haven't got pictures yet.

224. Woodland Sunflower (Helianthus divaricata) A sunflower that can handle shade! Not heavy shade, but a considerable amount.

225. Fringed Willowherb (Epilobium ciliatum) I didn't plant this, but she has cute tiny flowers and she has tasty leaves.

226. Starry False Solomon's Seal (Maianthemum stellatum) Little star-shaped white flowers become candy-striped red berries.

227. Narrow-Leaved Wild Leek (Allium burdickii) Like her close cousin, A. tricoccum, she only matures enough to flower after seven years, so this is special.

228. Mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum) Not pictured as she hasn't flowered yet.

229. Common Selfheal (Prunella vulgaris vulgaris) A common garden weed but she's native to my range of acceptability for my garden, so she stays wherever she's not in the way.

230. Bog Bean (Menyanthes trifoliata) Not pictured as she hasn't flowered yet.

231. Red Wakerobin (Trillium erectum) Her stem broke the first year I had her. I was afraid she'd die but I was able to splint her and she survived to flower again the following year for this picture!

232. Marsh Violet (Viola palustris) Small round leaves grow close to the ground and flowers come up on stalks a few inches above. As the name suggests she prefers things wet.

233. Duck Potato (Saggittaria latifolia) Not pictured as she hasn't flowered yet.

234. Purple avens (Geum rivale) Not pictured as she hasn't flowered yet.

235. Maypop (Passiflora incarnata) I got two cultivars and they sadly didn't survive the winter. Maybe the wild type would fare better if I could get my hands on that.

236. American Bur-Reed (Sparganium americanum) Fluffy ball flowers. She likes things moist to wet.

237. Heart-Leaved Alexanders (Zizia aptera) She's not quite as showy as her cousin, Zizia aurea, but a nice little plant in a moist to wet area.

238. Canada Burnet (Sanguisorba canadensis) Not pictured as she hasn't flowered yet.

239. Oval-Leaved Milkweed (Asclepias ovalifolia) Her second flowering year. She's considerably shorter than most milkweeds. Her cream-coloured flowers are a lovely addition to a garden. Especially if you're tempted to get the white cultivar of swamp milkweed, oval-leaf milkweed also likes wet areas and is well-behaved. Why not get her instead?

240. Redbud (Cercis canadensis) Not pictured as I haven't got pictures yet.

[rock-cedar-mosquito]

Red trillium, Trillium erectum, which my scouts call "stinking johnnies".

[carolinawrenn]

White wake-robin (Trillium erectum)

[wildergrimm]

Oc Interview 😼 tagged by @starocide

Tagging @retrovampz, @goofballproximitysurveyor and whoever else who wishes to join!

Name: Tank Driver (was once Jules Dubois)

Nickname(s): Verne, Tank, Stupid dog

Gender: Trans man

Star Sign: February 2, that’s uhh Aquarius

Height: 5’5” (165cm)

Sexual Orientation: Bisexual

Nationality/Ethnicity: Quebecois, half-Thai

Favorite Fruit: Tangerines

Favorite Season: He misses the snow

fave flower: Red trillium (Trillium erectum)

Favorite Scent: Gunpowder

Coffee, Tea, or Hot chocolate: Coffee (no sugar, but some milk)

Avg. Hours of Sleep: ………(Eventually gets around 6, but for a time he wouldn’t sleep for days on end)

Dog or cat person: He loves cats, but dogs get along with him really well. A few years down the road he ends up adopting a dog!

Dream Trip: Going back to the forest by his aunt and uncle’s house. (Oops! He’s been in space for a thousand years!)

Fave fictional character: There’s an in-universe fictional character he loves, but for irl characters…Sergei Dragunov and Leo Whitefang (He started out as a pure self insert so of course he likes fighting games <3)

Number of blankets they sleep with: 1-2

Random Fact: He has a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature and part of an MFA in ceramics!

[cedar-glade]

Trillium erectum with red ovaries and stigmatic column noticeable, flower is erect and facing up. A carrion flower species of Trillium, notably in rich acidic woodland often and rarely in more alkaline rich mesic woods. 

Muir Valley. 

[creativecommonsplants]

Red Trillium by nervousjessica on iNaturalist.

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

[rabbitinthemeadow]

The sweet emergence of song // Part 12

[malavoie1]

Sunset Trillium 2020

A Red Trillium at sunset.

This is another shot that was some time in the making. For about a week, I had my eyes on a group of these Red Trillium growing along the top of a slope at the edge of an old pine plantation. I knew what I wanted this shot to look like. I imagined the sky, glowing in bright sunset colours, seen through the pines with the flower in the foreground.

On a first try, for the sky to get colours in it the ambient light was too low and the flower and foreground were too dark. I tried increasing the exposure to get the flower bright enough but the shutter speed was too low so that the slightest puff of wind blurred the flower.

On another evening, I tried light painting the flower with an LED headlamp. Still this resulted in a fuzzy image and a washed out sky. Between tries there were some evening where the sky was cloudy and I would not have gotten the colours I wanted in the sky.

The evening I got this shot, the sky had finally cleared and I had brought a speedlight and strap-on diffuser. It was also the first evening where mosquitoes were out in mass. Lucky me with no bug dope; they ate me alive! The image was done in one shot at two seconds. The strobe was hand held off camera and fired manually with the output turned down to balance the sky.

Camera: Pentax K-3 Lens: Tamron SP 10-24mm f/3.5 DI II 22mm / ƒ/32 / 2.0s / ISO 100

Taken: 20/05/2020

[psikonauti]

Purple Trillium (Trillium erectum)