[In an effort to expedite posting over the next few months (I have articles to write, classes to teach, peas to pick and guest to entertain), I will be keeping it to one image and a paragraph. Each will be a portrait of a plant I have encountered for the first time this year, whether in the wild , a garden or a nursery. Here is number one…]

Spring flowers of the Great Lakes region are so ephemeral you can easily miss them. During a recent visit to my mother’s farm in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Michael and I went fishing at Lake Ottawa in Ottawa National Forest. The winds were high and the fishing miserable. Photography wasn’t so easy either but I got out the phone and took a shot of this Blue-bead Lily(Clintonia borealis) anyway. It is a spring ephemeral I seemed to have missed in my 40-plus years of visiting this lake.