Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Old-Fashioned May Day

When I was teaching at a women's college in Maine, back in the 1940s, some girls celebrated May Day by going into the forests and picking trillium (!), then leaving baskets on each others' doors.

4 comments:

  1. How times change...trillium is a protected species and it is now illegal to pick them in both NY and Wisconsin. They self-seed, and picking the flower keeps them from reproducing.

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  2. and did you enjoy yours today?

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  3. We have one in our back yard here in Vancouver! I should post a picture. Several years ago Connie and I started a campaign to rid the entire yard of English Ivy and put in natural vegetation instead. This is not easy, but we have eliminated bamboo, lambium (which Connie had naively planted because a patch of it grew near her family's cabin in the Adirondacks) and now the Ivy. Acres of it are gone. In its place we have native plants...including evergrees: mosses, ferns, boxwood, a sorrel, and annuals (breeding hearts, a couple of struggling lilies, false solomons seal...and one Trillium plant, with two flowers. It is turning pink these days. WE also have lots of emply bare ground to fill with more things before weeds take over.

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  4. I saw trillium at the new Native Plant Garden at the New York Botanical Garden. Very handsome white flowers. Here's a link to a video about the new garden:
    http://www.nybg.org/exhibitions/2013/native-plant-garden/

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