Fringed gentian a late bloomer, but worth the wait

[oneh2obabe]

Margaret Bream
Toronto Star

Right now, there’s a treasure hiding in plain sight in my neighbourhood park. It’s a flower so rare, so lovely it has inspired poems by Emily Dickinson and William Cullen Bryant, as well as an ode to its beauty by Henry Thoreau.

I’m speaking of the fringed gentian, Gentianopsis crinita, a late bloomer whose acquaintance I had not made until this time last year, when my naturalist friend Melanie introduced me to a patch of these striking indigo flowers with the delicate fringed petals in Taylor Creek Park. Melanie, a member of the Toronto Field Naturalists, is extremely knowledgeable about our native plants, but has a special interest in species that are rare or threatened locally. Quite aside from their delicate beauty, fringed gentians are in her crosshairs as they are threatened, endangered or extinct in large tracts of their natural range, primarily imperiled by habitat destruction.



Fringed gentians are native to wide swaths of North America once covered by glaciers, and are now restricted to locations where the soil is chalky, contains calcium carbonate and has a nearly neutral acidity. They particularly love wet thickets, and that is precisely where Melanie found them and showed them to me last year.

Undoubtedly, a great part of the gentian’s allure is its habit of beginning to bloom just when all the other flowers in Mother Nature’s garden are fading and preparing to be put to bed for the long winter to come.

Here is how 19th-century American poet William Cullen Bryant describes the autumnal arrival of these flowers in a stanza of his poem “To the Fringed Gentian”:

“The waitest late, and com’st alone / When woods are bare and birds have flown, / And frost and shortening days portend / The aged year is near his end.”

With that temporal urgency in mind, I went looking for the gentians again this week and found them blooming brightly in the same soggy meadow, up a little slope in Taylor Creek Park, where I had seen them last fall. Melanie told me that gentians love the wet, rainy weather we have been having, and she was optimistic they might still be around. She also warned that the first killing frost would cause the fragile blooms to wink out.

When I arrived at the gentians’ home in the park, on a dull and overcast day, all but the hardiest autumn blooms were fading. The goldenrods had turned a silvery grey, the purple asters’ bright golden centres had faded to the colour of claret, the calico asters were drooping and losing their petals and the bullrushes were exploding into seed. But down by my feet, tiny and hidden amongst the grass and leaf litter, were the gentians, bravely hanging on with their beautiful blue blooms. They weren’t all at their best: here and there, among the indigo eyes, were the brown ghosts of gentians past their prime.

I was lucky to see their blooms at all, considering the weather: gentians are known to only open in full sunlight; they close at night and stay mostly closed on cloudy days.

Over the next several hours, I knelt in the chilly, waterlogged field, attempting to get a crisp picture of the gentians’ fringed petals, with a chickadee, downy woodpecker and a scolding squirrel my only company. The time flew by, until the chatter of teens on the nearby path reminded me that school had let out for the afternoon. It was time to go. I was muddy and soaked to the skin, but exhilarated to have seen these rare, short-lived beauties once again.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/arti ... h-the-wait