Pretty Milkmaids All in a Row

milkmaids2

Come read about this week’s featured flower. Keep checking out these little snippets and you’ll soon know local flora like a pro.

Today, Cheryl Lisin of the Lost Coast Interpretive Association (like the Facebook page here--you’ll love the beautiful photos showing up in your status) talks about a delicate beauty–milkmaids.

She writes,

The milk maids are blooming! Flowers start out pinkish and fade to white – presumably after they are pollinated. It is a perennial, coming up year after year from an underground rhizome. The lower leaves are roundish, leaves higher up on the stem are divided into 3 or 5 lobes. Some leaves have pretty purple splotches and solid purple undersides. Milk maids grow in moist, shady forests and riparian areas, usually one here, one there, but sometimes forming dense patches.
milkmaids

The scientific name is (Cardamine californica) and it is in the mustard family, Brassicaceae. Another common name is toothwort, named for tooth like projections on the rhizomes.

 

Got a wildflower photo to share? We’d love to see it. Upload it in the comment section.

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Anthony Westkamper
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Anthony Westkamper
8 years ago

Attached is a photo of a grouping of trilliums which demonstrates the color changes which they go through. This is not a composite photo, but they really were all those colors on that one day. I think of these as a marker that Spring is well on its way, and an iconic wildflower of the North Coast.

N Judah
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N Judah
8 years ago

Lovely! My trilliums have just begun flowering this morning.

Anthony Westkamper
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Anthony Westkamper
8 years ago

Attached is a photo of the little “Brownies” or Fetid Adder’s Tongue (Scoliopus bigelovii) which bloom abundantly hereabouts. (Aka. Slinkpod)

N Judah
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N Judah
8 years ago

Oh, these are magnificent! I love how the flower head is splayed.