#large-flowered bellwort

[julianplum]

🌸🌱🐝🌿🍂🪻 // sunlight scavengers // spread from Gardening for Biodiversity by the Wild Seed Project // gouache on hot press paper

[speakingofnature]

Large-flowered Bellwort

In the spring, with machine-like efficiency, nature has perfected the process of producing woodland wildflowers from leaf mold and damp earth.

[microcosmicobservations]

Spring ephemerals at Governor's Island, Madison, WI. Spring beauty, dutchman's breeches, and large-flowered bellwort.

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[thebashfulbotanist]

Uvularia grandiflora is a fun spring flower we get in eastern North America. Although often called large-flowered bellwort, my favorite name for them is merrybells! They do have a merry look to them. 

Although historically used by some Indigenous groups as medicine, merrybells are only really used as ornamental plants today. 

[vandaliatraveler]

Sessile-leaf bellwort (Uvularia sessilifolia), also referred to as wild oats, straw lily, and little merrybells, is one of the most delicate and fragile of Appalachia’s early spring wildflowers. The plant’s distinctive form reminds me of a ballet dancer’s precise, graceful curtsy. For all its beauty, this lover of rich, damp woods is easy to overlook; it grows low to the ground, and its demure, creamy yellow flower is often obscured by slender, drooping leaves that clasp the branching stem. It’s much larger and more ostentatious cousin, large-flowered bellwort (Uvularia grandiflora), grows in a similar habitat and at the same time of year.

[debunkshy]

Large-flowered Bellwort

Eagle Heights, WI, 4-17-17

[vandaliatraveler]

Starting in mid to late April, a gentle ballet of swooning leaves and nodding yellow flowers unfolds in the moist, calcareous forests of Appalachia.  The featured performer is large-flowered bellwort (Uvularia grandiflora), a graceful, shapely perennial herb distinguished by its ovate, perfoliate leaves and yellow, bell-shaped flowers.  Mature plants droop from the weight of their leaves and flowers, giving the impression of lissome dancers.  Also known as merrybells and cornflower, large-flowered bellwort reproduces both sexually and asexually, the former by means of seeds (spread by ants) and the latter by means of a branching rhizome.  The plant is capable of forming small colonies.  Native American tribes made a salve of the plant’s roots to relive pain from swelling.  Given its lovely symmetry and attractive flowers, it’s not surprising that large flowered bellwort has gained the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit.

[debunkshy]

Large-flowered Bellwort (Uvularia grandiflora)

Blue Mound State Park, WI, 4-23-17