Trillium
J.E. Shields (Fri, 02 May 2008 08:57:02 PDT)

I spent last weekend in the Smokies (Great Smoky Mountains National Park
and environs), riding around with a local friend looking at Trillium in
bloom. This guy can even spot Trillium NOT in bloom, from a pickup truck
traveling 35 mph.

Still, we saw Trillium! Around Gatlinburg, Tennessee, just outside the
park, Trillium luteum were as common as dandelions along roadsides, both
outside the park as well as inside. We saw slopes covered with Trillium
grandiflorum in some places and with T. erectum album in others in the
park. In the lower elevation areas around Gatlinburg, we saw T. simile,
which is probably a subspecies or form of T. erectum album. In a very few
places we saw a very few plants of T. rugelii, a white nodding trillium,
and T. vaseyi, the red nodding trillium. (Not both in the same places.) I
also saw imported (from Kentucky and Missouri) T. flexipes, which looks to
me like T. rugelii. The flexipes were planted in my friend's research nursery.

The nursery is devoted to studying questions like how does T. simile relate
to T. erectum album? How does yellow T. luteum relate to red-brown T.
cuneatum? Are the occasional red-brown plants in colonies of luteum mutants
or hybrids with the distant cuneatum? He works under the All Taxa
Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI) project in Great Smoky Mountains National
Park, and he is the Trillium specialist in the project.

We did not see T. undulatum, which has not been found inside the park so
far, nor T. catesbaei, nor T. sulcatum. Still, I don't think there are many
places where you can spend one weekend, stay within a radius of about 20
miles, and see 6 species of Trillium in bloom. It was a great plant
weekend! There were also Claytonia caroliniana and Erythronium umbilicatum
in bloom at high elevations and Sedum ternatum, Anemonella thalictroides,
Geranium maculatum, Iris cristata, and Maianthemum racemosum in bloom in
abundance at lower elevations.

Now if we could just do something about the food.......

Jim Shields
back in central Indiana (USA) with a few new roadside weeds.

*************************************************
Jim Shields USDA Zone 5 Shields Gardens, Ltd.
P.O. Box 92 WWW: http://www.shieldsgardens.com/
Westfield, Indiana 46074, USA
Tel. ++1-317-867-3344 or toll-free 1-866-449-3344 in USA