Bottomland Floor Plants

     When cheery, yellow dandelion blossoms and lovely blue violet flowers are at their peak of blooming abundantly on southeastern Pennsylvania lawns from mid to late April, I know to look for the large leaves of skunk cabbage, the umbrella leaves of May apples, the pink blooms of spring beauty wild flowers and other flowering plants on the floors of woods and meadows, each bisected by clear-running brooks.  I did just that again, on April 22 of this year, and saw several kinds of beautiful, interesting plants.
     I visited the edges of four varying-sized patches of bottomland woods in farmland in eastern Lancaster County and western Chester County, and adjacent pastures, to again view floor plants. These bottomland woods and meadows exist today because the soil has always been too wet to cultivate.  But trees could be removed in some areas, and they were to create grazing pastures for farm animals. 
     It's interesting that skunk cabbage, May apples and spring beauties, all native woodland vegetation, have continued to live in the many sunny meadows they were forced to adjust to when shade-producing trees were eliminated.  I have seen many grassy pastures patched and carpeted with one or more kinds of these lovely, adaptable woodland plants. 
     In some pastures, these woodland plants are neighbors to the long ago sun-adapted cattails.  Nesting red-winged blackbirds perch on cattail and skunk cabbage leaves to sing their territorial songs.
     I found the large, upright leaves of skunk cabbage in every bottomland woods and some bottomland meadows I visited that April day.  Skunk cabbage flower hoods sprout in this area by early February and their leaves start to grow by the end of that month.  Early insects visit the flower hoods to sip nectar from the flowers and black bears eat the large leaves early in spring.
     I saw patches of May apples in some bottomland woods and meadows.  Each clump of them resembles a group of elves standing together among green pastures and woods.  Each older May apple has two umbrella leaves and will open a white flower early in May.  Younger May apples have one umbrella.
     Pretty, pink patches of spring beauties carpeted parts of some woodland and meadow floors that I saw that day.  Those wild flowers help beautify spring woods and pastures in this area.  It's been stated that Native Americans of the eastern woodlands dug up spring beauty bulbs, boiled them and ate them as we do white potatoes.
     There were other kinds of interesting plants in those bottomland woods and meadows that sunny April day.  One pasture had a few each of tall black alder trees and silver maple trees in it.  The maples had green seeds hanging on their twigs.  A woodlot, and a meadow adjacent to it, was dominated by red maple trees, white oak trees and pin oak trees.  The red maples had small red seeds on their twigs.
     Spice bushes dominated the shrub layer of those two woodlands.  Each spice bush had clusters of tiny, yellow flowers along its twigs.  And the twigs, as always, had a spicy fragrance when a tiny bit of bark was peeled away.
     Swamp-loving cinnamon ferns were abundant in one woodlot.  Each leaf of each fern looked like a fiddle head as the leaf uncurled as it grew taller.
     Patches of glossy-leafed, yellow-flowered lesser celandines were cheery on the floodplain of a long, thin riparian woods.  Several partially-shaded floodplains are carpeted yellow with the alien lesser celandines.
     Native trout lily plants with their twin, dappled leaves and single yellow bloom carpeted another wooded floodplain.  They might have been named such because they bloom during trout season or because their leaves are spotted like the flanks of trout.
     I saw several kinds of beautiful plants in bottomland woods and meadows that day.  And they all probably have a good future because the soggy soil of those habitats can't be readily developed.