Spring Beauty

Claytonia virginica

Spring beauty is one of the spring-blooming plants known as spring ephemerals.  These plants grow quickly from underground roots in the early spring, flower, and produce seed, and often die back again before the trees have leafed out.  In this way, they are able to take advantage of the brief period each year when the deciduous woodlands are warm enough for growth and bright enough to provide ample sunshine for photosynthesis. Few flowers bloom in the deep woods in the summer and fall; there is just too little light available.

Spring beauty has flowers with three to five petals, which are white, or pinkish, or rose, or, my favorite, white with pink candy stripes.  Several color variants can be seen in the pictures.  Some botanists argue that the petals are actually sepals and the plant has no petals.  The flowers close at night and on cloudy days, but each flower lasts for several days.  The leaves, varying from green to purple, are long and narrow, tapering at both ends.  The plant grows up each spring from a deep tuber which stores the energy from photosynthesis until the next spring.

Spring beauty favors wetlands, seeps, moist woods and prairies from New Hampshire to Ontario and Quebec, west to Minnesota, south to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.

A very similar plant is the Carolina spring beauty, Claytonia caroliniana, which differs in having spoon-shaped leaves.  The two plants appear to be closely related and are believed to have separated evolutionarily rather recently.  Despite its name, Carolina spring beauty is a more northerly plant, growing from Newfoundland and the Atlantic provinces of Canada west to Minnesota, south through New England and New York and in the mountains to Georgia and North Carolina.

The genus Claytonia is mostly a western genus.  There are 25 species in North America south to Guatemala and in Russia.  A twenty-sixth species occurs only in the Altai Mountains of Siberia and Mongolia.  Claytonia perfoliata, of the western United States, is known as miner's lettuce because its leaves were purportedly a staple of salads consumed by miners attracted to the gold and silver deposits of the west.  It is still sold by seed companies for gardeners to raise as a gourmet green.  All members of the genus are noted for producing a small white, oil-rich structure on their seeds called an elaiosome, which serves as a bribe and reward to ants that disperse the seeds.  The ants carry the seeds away to new locations, rip off the elaiosomes, and take them home to eat.  The ants in Wildwood must have been busy, for spring beauty can be found over much of the western slope of the Park.