e- phem- er- al – lasting for only a brief time

Spring ephemerals, like Sleeping Beauty, awaken across the floor of Southern Appalachian forests when the warm spring sun shines through the bare trees and kisses the fecund earth. The fleckless satin-white petals of bloodroot appear like magic over yesterday’s brown leaf litter.

The Southern Appalachians are renown for their prolific diversity of wildflowers. But one group has a special place in the hearts of many flower fanciers. Spring ephemerals are some of the earliest harbingers of spring. They splash across the mountains overnight like the first broad streaks of an artist’s brush adding color and promise to the gray-brown forest.

The whites of bloodroot, toothwort, sweet white violet, trailing arbutus and fringed phacelia are complimented by the yellow of trout lily and the pink-striped spring beauty. Trilliums of different colors, crested dwarf iris, sharp-lobed and round-lobed hepatica and anemones might also be considered ephemerals.

I could find no set-in-stone definition nor definitive species list for spring ephemerals. The species varied from region to region. While most treatments of spring ephemerals simply noted them as appearing before the canopy leafs out and being short lived, I did find a couple of references that quantified that time frame. According to those references, ephemerals are those wildflowers that complete their entire above ground growth including flowering, fruiting and senescing within a two-month period.

Now this doesn’t mean that all bloodroots or all trilliums will disappear within two months of the first one appearing. It’s a general time frame for individual plants. For example, ephemerals on sunny south-facing slopes may open before those on shadier north-facing slopes, but those on north-facing slopes will be around for a couple of months also. Still, most of the wildflowers we know as ephemerals will be gone by the end of May.

These plants, like most of Ma Nature’s “niche-fillers,” have special adaptations that allow them to take advantage of their early-riser status. That full, early-spring sunlight — unimpeded by leaves — might serve as an alarm clock. It’s kinda like when your wife who has to get up at 5:30 a.m. hits the light switch while you’re right in the middle of helping J-Lo escape from the tomb – we’re all of a sudden wide awake.

But, as most who live in the mountains know, sunlight on April Fool’s Day doesn’t necessarily translate into warmth. But ephemerals have developed ways to deal with cold temperatures. In bloodroot for example, the leaf wraps around the flowering stem to help trap warm air. Other ephemerals are hirsute – meaning covered with dense hairs. These hairs help trap warm air also, keeping the plant warm.

We all need nutrients to grow and spring ephemerals are no exception. The problem – spring ephemerals have low nutrient absorption rates. The solution – by being the first plant on the block in the spring you have first crack at soil nutrients that happen to be at their highest level in the early spring.

These and other adaptations allow ephemerals to get busy and get their growing season over with before the canopy closes in and before later sleepers awaken to compete for nutrients, etc.

But simply because we don’t see these plants after May doesn’t mean they’re not busy. While ephemerals have low nutrient absorption rates, they have high resorbtion efficiency, meaning they retain those nutrients well.

After a brief summer nap – all that reproduction is hard work – ephemerals are busy once again. The cooler autumn temperatures apparently signal an end to dormancy and the ephemerals use the stored nutrients to increase root and shoot growth during autumn and winter months, setting the stage for the annual early-spring explosion.

The fleeting tugs at the heartstrings. But the truth is – the fleeting, like the bloom of spring ephemerals – is simply a snapshot of a continuous process.

(Don Hendershot can be reached at ddihen@earthlink.net)