Comely Comrades

Provincial emblem, watercolor painting of trillium plant

As children, my sisters and I were often taken on Sunday afternoon excursions into the woods at the back of the farm. Mom taught us the names of the spring flowers, the names of the trees under which they grew, and identified songbirds by sight and call, nest and egg.

All six of us would fan out on a hunt for wildflowers!

Having found a glade covered in snow-white trilliums, shouts rang through the woods, "Come over here!" Dewy, three-petalled blooms!! The trillium, our provincial emblem, are borne on single stems with three-part leaves. Sometimes the trillium plant popped up in most unusual places...comely comrades of mossy old stumps.

Besides the pure white trilliums, Jack-in-the-pulpits, low growing blue, yellow and white violets, big umbrellas, clusters of fragile pink mayflowers, yellow dogtooth violets with splotchy leaves nodding at the foot of smooth beechwoods, white Dutchman's breeches dangling above finely cut leaves, hepaticas whose 'blood' stained our hands, crimson trilliums...wonders of the springtime woodlot! "Come over here!" rang out again and again as wondrous discoveries were made!

We couldn't go home, though, without adding leeks (wild onions) to our fragile bouquets, digging them out of the black, black earth with the sharp end of a stick. How good they tasted with a slice of bread and butter!