If you've been to Sylvia Lake in May, you will remember seeing the carpets of white flowers on the forest floor. Those flowers were trilliums, and they were probably white, but if you look closer, you might find a red trillium. Our trillium features three white or wine-red petals above a whorl of three diamond-shaped leaves. Trillium is one of spring’s early bloomers, it typically grows in deciduous forests where a layer of fall leaf litter helps nourish and protect plants. The typical flower color for this species is white, but at Sylvia Lake, we see two distinct color forms of sweet white trillium. (Trillium simile) Some white trilliums turn pink with age, but plants with a rosey-pink blossom is more elusive and very special.

Trillium boasts a host of aliases: wake robin because it opens when migrating robins return in spring, or stinking benjamin, which has to do with the fact that those sweet-looking blooms smell like rotting flesh. Really. This trillium has no nectar to attract bees for pollinating, so it uses the odor of decay to lure green flesh-flies, which are duped into thinking they’ve found a carcass on which to lay eggs. Instead, they pollinate the flowers. Psych!