May 31, 2020 - Wildflowers

We’re spending much more time at our northern Minnesota lake home this year. This gives me a chance to see and photograph some of the many lovely wildflowers that grow in our yard and the surrounding woods. This small, low growing white flower is a Wood Anemone. It is only one inch wide and less than six inches tall. It tends to grow in groups on the forest floor. An individual plant can take up to five years before it produces flowers.

AnemoneWoodquinquefoliaDunningLakeItascaCounty20200523

Winter Cress was the first flower to bloom this year in our wildflower garden. It is also called Yellow Rocket Plant and is in the mustard family. A group of flowers grows at the top of a one to two-foot stalk. I also recorded seeing it in 2017 but not in the last two years. Seems odd that it would disappear and then suddenly reappear again this year.

CressWinterWildflowerGardenDunningLakeItascaCounty20200527

The photo on the left shows an individual stalk of Pussytoes flowers. It does kind of look like a cat’s foot. They can be up to one foot tall and have velvety leaves that grow low to the ground. We have a patch of them growing in our yard as shown in the photo on the right.

PussytoesDunningLakeItascaCounty20200528

Wild Strawberries are low growing plants that we find scattered around our yard. They do produce a great tasting small berry, but the birds and other critters seem to get them before we can.

StrawberryWildDunningLakeItascaCounty20200528

I submitted a photo of this purple flower to a Facebook plant identification page. The only response I got was that it’s a Viola species. I think there are many of those and they might be hard to identify from a photo. So, I will be content to just label it a Violet.

VioletDunningLakeItascaCounty20200524

We did find this one in our plant identification books. One book calls it Downy Yellow Violet, and the other book just calls it Yellow Violet.

VioletYellowViolapubescensDunningLakeItascaCounty20200525