solitary show stopper

my husband, steve, and i have been especially attentive to our woodland this year. last spring, to pass the time during quarantine, i had cleared our woods of the invasive shrub called buckthorn, which had made a tangled mess of the understory. i did it to open up the views into the woods, and to allow dappled sunshine in. what i didn’t expect was this year’s explosion of spring ephemerals–those demure native wildflowers that only bloom for a few weeks in april and may before the trees leaf out. we’ve found an astounding number of them so far: hepatica, bloodroot, marsh marigold, wild ginger, dutchman’s breeches, trout lilies, wild geranium, bellworts, anemones, violets, periwinkles, jack in the pulpits, mayapples, trilliums, and now this solitary shooting star. one of the most elegant of them all.

shooting star wildflower (Primula sect. Dodecatheon)