By the end of winter, Stacey and I -and many others in western Pennsylvania- are anxious for that first sunny day to go into the woods and look for spring, sensationally announced by wildflowers, and flowering trees. The woods still look like winter when the first flowers appear, and that’s their strategy, to pop up in the sun-drenched forest floor and understory before the canopy leafs-out and darkens their world in shadow. From early spring through deep green summer to the end of fall, one flowering species follows another, budding, blooming, and fading in the fashion of a showy calendar. The whole point is to attract the insect pollinators that fertilize the flowers to make seeds for the next generation. Each flowering plant has evolved with a specific set of pollinators in a symbiotic relationship timed to the small window when the flowers bloom. Many insects have a specific set of plants needed to host their young. The timed appearance of the bugs sets the clock for the arrival of migrating birds who search the fields, forests, towns, and yards for the right plants they know will host the insects to feed their young. When they see yards filled with the exotics plants commonly used for landscaping, they perceive them as foodless deserts and keep flying. Pretty as these yards may be to us, to them they may just as well be made of plastic.

Spring Flowers

Early April in the Alleghenies, the tulip trees, oaks and hickories are still a leafless forest phalanx of winter gray and black trunks. That’s when Stacey and I walk into the woods to see if the only serviceberry we know is in there is in bloom. The smallish, otherwise unremarkable tree is hard to find in both winter and summer, but in its glorious spring moment, it can’t be missed. For us, the white flowers of the serviceberry announce the impending arrival of spring. Around the same time, spindly spicebush branches bust out in little yellow flowers. Bluish-black and rimmed with orange spots, the spicebush swallowtail takes its name from this understory host tree. 

Serviceberry and spicebush signs of early April spring in a still-wintered woods.

By early May, blooming pin cherries create splashes of white in an Allegheny forest just blushed with spring green and hints of red from flowering maple trees. Black cherry trees bloom later with spikey racemes of clustered white flowers. Cherry trees are a critical cornerstone species in the Alleghenies, supporting more insect life than any other tree except oaks. 

Pin cherry white and reddish hues of maple flowers on Fleming Knob of White’s Whites, Indiana, PA.

Pin cherry blossoms (left) in early May, and black cherry blossoms (right) in late May.

The north slope of White’s Woods drops down to University Farm, a recreational part of IUP Co-op Park that has not been farmed in more than half a century where a few ragged apple trees from a long-lost orchard throw out a show of white blossoms. Their flowers are similar to the pin cherries blooming at the same time because both are part of the extensive Rosaceae family.

Spring is in full flower When the dogwoods are in bloom. The cherry trees are scattered throughout the woods, but the dogwoods like edge, their riot of four-petaled flowers joined by ornamental dogwoods planted in adjacent yards.

Stacey with a flowering dogwood in May.

The warming weather draws violets from the ground, blue, yellow, and white. Their flower faces with two petals up and three down rise and inch or two above a base of heart-shaped leaves. Summer meadows filled with orange fritillary butterflies can only happen due to the violets that support their larvae.

White, yellow, and blue violets blooming close to the sun-drenched, lightly canopied forest floor in late April through early May.

White’s Woods blankets a low, saddled ridge where sandstone was quarried by early Indiana residents and adjacent farmers for foundation blocks that still support older houses and barns. A long-abandoned quarry divot on Fleming Knob is now covered with white violets every April. When the violets are up so too are the rue anemone, especially in a hilltop patch that is suddenly covered with hundreds of delicate, white flowers. The size of most Allegheny wildflowers is much smaller than the zoomed-in nature guide photos of them. As a result, it is easy to overlook a forest floor covered in rue anemone standing five feet above them scanning the woods. At ankle level, however, their diminutive beauty is revealed. Spring beauties have the same pattern at the same time; tiny, flowers with white petals faintly striped in purple growing in easily overlooked patches at the tree trunk base of forest giants.

For years, Stacey and I walked along a rocky path soils near the summit of Overlook Hill and watched twin lady slipper leaves emerge from the well-drained wondering if they were ever going to throw out a bloom. We blamed an over-abundance of blossom-chomping deer. Finally, a few of these orchids succeeded in sending up pink slipper-shaped flowers to fool the pollinators into thinking there was something inside. There isn’t, but the ruse seems to work well enough to procreate.

Pink lady slipper survives the hungry deer herd.

Found along the sunny edge of the woods, fleabane, like violets, readily colonize nearby lawns, and even cracks in the sidewalk. Most of these wayward wildflowers are carelessly mowed over before they can do their job supporting insects that support the birds. We mow around ours, letting them grow up with clumps of too tall grass. The tiny daisy-like blooms of this aster are welcome mats for tiny pollinators, and a banquet buffet for little, green katydids. Philadelphia fleabane arrives first, followed by later blooming fleabane that stands the summer.

By mid-May our walks in the woods are met with wildflowers at every step. Lavender wild geraniums line the path with low growing yellow cinquefoil, and high growing yellow ragwort. Tulip-shaped tulip tree flowers rain-ripped from the closing canopy lie among the new ferns and Canada mayflower. Blue-eyed grass appears in meadows bordered by snow-white masses of flowering blackberry bushes wild with arcing canes.

The first branch of a tulip tree in the interior part of the forest may be forty feet up putting the flowers at the sunny top of the canopy only to be seen when cast down by a passing storm.

Blackberry is another member of the Rosaceae family, as is the pasture rose that blooms around the same time in similar, sundrenched habitats. Both are easily confused with the invasive multiflora rose that grows with them. They may appear similar, but they are not the same. Multiflora rose is an East Asian exotic that got here through the ornamental garden trade. Because multiflora rose did not co-evolve with native insects, nothing here eats it, giving the invasive an advantage that allows it to crowd   out native plants that native insects and the birds that eat them rely on. Many bees, butterflies and other insects will nectar on invasive flowers to get sugar readily found in many flowers, and birds may even eat the fruit, but none of them can raise offspring on these exotics. In the absence of native hosts plants the dependent insects and birds go too regardless of how many bees and butterflies you see nectaring on your foodless butterfly bush.

Rosaceae blooms: blackberry (left) and pasture rose (right). 

The near-woods are filled with invasives that throw out flowers in spring, but represent nothing more than an expanding ecological food desert that threatens native ecosystems regardless of how pretty their flowers may or may not be. Thorny Japanese barberry blooms so early the flowers are sometimes covered in western Pennsylvania’s last onion snow. Barberry is one of the first plants in the forest to green up along with weedy-looking garlic mustard soon topped with tiny, white flower heads that will make thousands of seeds. Towards the end of May, pinkish, purple, and white dames rocket make a showy appearance along the roadside edges of White’s Woods.

Invasives in bloom: multiflora rose , barberry in an April snow, garlic mustard, dames rocket in May.

The winter jacket I’m usually wearing when serviceberry and spicebush are in bloom has long since been lost to the closet by the time we go into White’s Woods looking for jack-in -the-pulpit, and fire pinks. Loving shade and a moist forest, Jack-in-the-pulpits are heralded by the appearance of a three-leafletted plant on the forest floor in May. The plant may raise one or two sets of leaflets up on tall stems and a flower on a separate stem. The alien-looking bloom is streaked green and white and sometimes purple with a hooded spathe covering a spadix covered in tiny flowers. The plant generates heat and an odor to attract pollinating flies like its skunk cabbage relative. 

Blooming forest floor in May: Jack-in-the-pulpit, mayapple, and goldenseal.

By the time the jack-in-the-pulpits are up, the mayapples have flowered with one blossom in the crotch of only those plants having two sets of palmate parachute-like leaves. The fertilized flower turns into the “apple” later in summer. Mayapple grows in patches of clones spread by underground rhizomes as well as seeds. Goldenseal has a similar structure and growing habit that also spreads by rhizomes, each small, white flower topping a stem above the palmate leaf.

A star-shaped celebration of spring, fire pinks call out to passing hummingbirds.

Mid-May to early June is also the time Stacey and I search the forest for fire pinks. The flower opens to become a five-pointed star with long, narrow rays colored a brilliant magenta, which glows like neon to hummingbirds recently arrived from their northward migration. The flower is perfectly fitted to the beaks of hummingbirds that lap up the nectar and carry the pollen to the next flower in the forest. 

Summer Flowers

After the spring fling of wildflowers, the woods settle into summer with broadening leaves capturing nearly every bit of sunlight filtering to the shady forest floor. Among the verdant greenery spring flowers become fruit, but in the sunny meadows a second wildflower show is being staged. During the dog days of mid-summer, Stacey and I head for the Powerline Meadow that slices through the middle of White’s Woods. Although a path for weedy invasives, the Powerline Meadow also supports patches of native perennials like milkweed that turn this lowly utility corridor into a butterfly garden. Multiple species of butterflies and hummingbird moths bounce between the compound heads of purple milkweed flowers. Spicebush swallowtails born in the nearby woods, and fritillaries nursed by violets join monarchs that only lay their eggs on milkweed during a generational migration that pulses north to Canada all summer followed by a long trip back to winter in Mexico taken by a super-generation of monarchs bred for the task. 

Common Milkweed turns the Powerline Meadow into a butterfly sanctuary every summer with monarchs, Eastern tiger swallowtails, and fritillaries drawn in by nectar.

Milkweed shares the meadow with the white, compound medallions of Queen Ann’s lace, which hardly gets any insect action by comparison because it is a non-native invasive whose evolutionary home is in Afghanistan. Non-native bull and Canada thistle, however, do attract nectaring bees and butterflies. 

In the waning days of summer, some perennials that have spent the hot months gradually growing unnoticed as stalky, background greenery have reached six or seven feet in height and are now ready to bloom. Yellow wingstem flowers like floppy-petaled daisies crown towering plants always in proximity to equally tall ironweed topped with clusters of purple florets. Ironweed is one of the 500 or so species in the aster family that makes up the bulk of meadow plants flowering from late summer into the fall. The asters are critical nectaring stations for southward migrating butterflies, and the main source of late season pollen and nectar for local bees and butterflies. Another even taller member of the aster family, Joe Pye weed proclaims the approach of the school year with a crowning cluster of pinkish purple flowers. Joe Pye was the Christian name taken by Mohican sachem Schauquethqueat who used the plant to treat typhus in eighteenth century Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Late boneset is another aster closely related to Joe Pye weed that throws out a clustered head of white florets at the end of summer. 

White’s Woods is on the distant ridge beyond this Late Boneset patch at peak bloom in early September.

Fall Flowers

Once the school year starts, our collective mindset switches to fall foliage, football, and closing down the pool and patio with the approach of winter. Despite our seasonal deflected attention, however, the wildflower show started in spring continues well into fall, and not just with some waning late-bloomers, but with a showing-stopping spectacle staged by the huge aster family. The annual autumn performance peaks in September when we stroll the fields at University Farm. One of two farms on the margins of White’s Woods purchased for IUP Coop Park, University Farm has several un-mowed wildflower fields at the edge of needlessly mowed dead space. 

Stacey enjoys the autumn aster show at University Farm.

Asters grow in bushy masses with hundreds of small, daisy-like flowers that are not really flowers, but clusters of florets. The center disk consists of fertile florets that offer bees and butterflies pollen and nectar to have some of that pollen carried off to fertilize other florets. The outer rays are sterile florets that guide the bees and butterflies to the centers. As the pollen is lost from older flowers, the centers turn from yellow to red signaling to the pollinator where to focus their efforts.

Autumn asters everywhere in the wildflower fields at University Farm.

Asters come in a dizzying variety that can be a challenge to identify; calico asters, panicled asters, crooked asters, smooth asters, swamp asters, New York asters, New England asters, and likely many more can be found at University Farm. Surrounding the color-changing centers, the rays are typically white or some shade of blue from the pale blue of the New York aster to the almost purple blue of the later blooming New England aster. Towards the wetter soils, asters give way to pale green jewelweed covered with orange flowers speckled with dark orange spots shaped to fit the beak of hummingbirds heading south for the winter. Many come to know jewelweed as the touch-me-nots of our childhood where the brush of a tiny finger on a ripe pod triggers an explosion that shoots the seed up to six feet away. 

In the shift from September to October when the trees are just starting to turn, entire fields turn yellow with different types of goldenrod, the solidago genus of the aster family. Goldenrods support more than fifty different insect species. The amount of flying, flitting, buzzing, and crawling that goes on in a September field of goldenrod meets or exceeds the insect activity of any garden setting at any other time in the summer. When billions of flowers go to seed, acres of goldenrod become winter birdfeeders.

Goldenrod in bloom at the IUP Co-Op Park University Farm as September turns to October.

Our fall foliage strolls through White’s Woods coincide with the final blooms of the year. In a remarkable case of seasonal symmetry, we find ourselves back where we started last April in the spicebush understory where witch hazel also grows. The season starts with the little yellow spicebush flowers, and ends in the same place with little yellow, witch hazel flowers. The ribbony flowers turn into next fall’s fruit creating a bewitching coincidence of flower and fruit that like the jewelweed is an exploding packet that expels the seed. 

First frost finally ends the flower show, putting Indiana’s piece of the Allegheny forest in winter slumber.

The yellow in the understory of this October view in White’s Woods is not fall foliage but ribbony witch hazel flowers.

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Written by Kevin Patrick. All photos were taken in the White’s Woods Nature Center and adjacent Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) Co-op Park, a 500-acre forest located on the northwestern edge of Indiana, Pennsylvania.