Goose Pond Mountain State Park, 23 April 2007

Laurel posts...

The end of April brings some early wildflowers to Chester, NY! While driving along route 17M to the right of a temporary stoplight erected at the construction site adjacent to Goose Pond Mountain State Park, Kat and I noticed that the entire hillside was carpeted with thousands of white wildflowers. These turned out to be Dutchman’s breeches, so named because the flowers resemble an upside-down pairs of pants. The scene was right out of an Audubon calendar. Dutchman’s breeches have lacy green foliage and each stem is hung with a number of blossoms. They were growing alongside the nodding, yellow bells and spotted leaves of the trout lily and the white blossoms and single leaves of the bloodroot, creating a lovely woodland carpet of color. All these early blooming spring wildflowers attract bumblebees, solitary bees, flies, beetles and other early pollinators. If these insects fail to show, they can also self-pollinate. Later the seeds of the bloodroot and the Dutchman’s breeches will be harvested by ants and taken underground where those that are not eaten will sprout to form new plants. The seeds of the trout lily are distributed by crickets and other insects in a similar fashion. Trout lilies take nine years to produce a flower, and we happily photographed these blooms of plants that were older than our children!