Even in an environment as man-made as New York City’s, nature stubbornly persists â€" in park woodlands, empty lots, and between the cracks of the sidewalk. In an occasional series, Dave Taft, a senior-level park ranger in New York City with the National Park Service, will be offering close-in portraits of the city’s plants and animals.
Cherry blossoms get the fanfare this time of year, but watching the less-heralded bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) bloom offers the instinctive thrill of seeing yet another spring unfurl.
Bloodroot blooms are part of an ancient cycle that includes the annual appearance of spring ephemerals in our temperate woodlands. Ephemerals bloom and complete their lives almost entirely before tree leaves expand to block the sun from the forest floor.
Bloodroot’s icy white flowers persist only a day or two in the best circumstances, but April’s famously tempestuous weather may wash away a whole season’s bloom in minutes if the weather is uncooperative. Luckily, the bloodroot doesn’t require much time to complete its business. The brilliant white blooms with their hot yellow stamens emerge from the soil without competition and become beacons for impatient, flower-starved suitors like still cold-clumsy bumble bees, syrphid flies, butterflies, moths and beetles.
Dave Taft During the first warm days of spring, the flower bud pokes up above the rolled leaf. Click to enlarge.In early April, snow and frost are very real threats to such a fragile flower; consequently, the bloodroot wraps its bud within its single furled leaf until the first semi-warm days of spring, when it pushes past the leaf’s last twist, and opens broadly. That a flower so absolutely white bleeds a haunting orange-red sap is disconcerting to many, but a bruised or picked plant drips with a sticky crimson sap that leaves its mark on would-be pickers, and gives the plant its name. (Stains aside, the plant is rare and should not be disturbed.) This startling, humanlike quality inspired Native Americans and colonists to experiment with pharmaceutical concoctions made from bloodroot.
The second week of April is always a good time to begin looking for bloodroot in our local woodlands, so I recently parked my car at a familiar pullout along one of New York City’s busiest highways and entered a favorite Bronx woodland.
Just yards down the trail, where the sounds of grinding gears and wheels had faded to low grumbling, bloodroot was flowering profusely, its white blooms starkly outlined against the dark brown leaf litter of a winter-gripped woods. Another of spring’s earliest arrivals, a palm warbler, flitted from branch to bare branch, tail bobbing, and keeping me at a comfortable distance while a mourning cloak butterfly tried to drive me off its trail.
If winter was warm, as it was in 2012, the flowers will have advanced, but if, like this year, the winter was snowy and the spring cool, wet and reluctant, you will find the blooms just beginning to open, as I did on my walk. The bloodroot plants here numbered in the hundreds, some with open flowers, but far more in bud, ready, for at least the next week or two, to thrill the next ritual seeker in these Bronx woods.
