NODDING TRILLIUM 



Trillium gleasoni Fern. 



April - May The leaves are large and broad, bright green and veiny. 

 Hilly woods Three of them extend at angles from the top of the tall, 

 smooth stem, and from the middle curves a flower stem 

 with a white flower on it. The petals roll tightly back, and the flower 

 bends so that usually it hangs below the level of the leaves. This is the 

 nodding trillium in the Illinois woods, the tallest of its tribe. 



It grows in rich, shady woodlands ; the richer the woods, the bigger 

 the ])]ants. Talhoun County produces some which grow almost three feet 

 high with flowers Ave inches in diameter, but this is not the general rule. 

 It is seldom, however, a small plant. Nobly, in its classic plan of three, 

 it ornaments the woods where its more elegant kin. the great white tril- 

 lium, does not grow. 



It is late April or May when the uixlding trillium blooms. The 

 oven-bird has come up from the southern jungles and, on its way to Wis- 

 consin forests, pauses a while in an Illinois woods. On long pink legs 

 the oven-bird walks, teetering its tail, beneath the maya]iple uml)rellas 

 where the cupped white waxen flowers open : pokes among tlie little bright 

 green brittle ferns; pauses a moment to pick an insect from a yellow 

 violet leaf. The oven-bird looks like a snuill tlirush, but has a crown 

 striped with red, black, and buff, and walks, wide-eyed and cautiously, 

 in the underpinning of the woods. It walks under the broadly expanded 

 leaves of nodding tiilliums, then flies to a twig of an oak whose new 

 leaves are pink and velvety, and utters a wild song flung in rising cres- 

 cendoes to the woods, a spontaneous expression of the delight of spring- 

 time. This is spring. Here are birds. And nodding trilliums once again 

 are in full bloom. 



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