Erythronium Americanum, Yellow Trout Lily With Pennsylvania Sedge

This listing is for Pennsylvania Sedge tucked into the same plugs as a few Trout Lily bulbs, for a season long groundcover after the Trout Lilies go dormant in the summer.

Spring ephemerals, these lovely flowers emerge and bloom each year before the leaves appear on the deciduous canopy trees that they grow among. Thriving in rich soils in areas that have plenty of moisture in the early spring, they can also grow in dryer settings but may only bloom very sparsely.

While I’ve seen communities of these flowers growing in rich, open woodlands with abundant blooms, in the dry, sandy soil of my Perth place there are far more small, single leaf individuals than there are mature, two leaf blooming plants.

This seems to be quite common for this species, with as few as 1 in 200 plants blooming in any given year in many patches, according to their Wikipedia profile. When combined with very low rates of seed production, with only around 10% of pollenated flowers producing seeds, the incredible numbers of these that can be found even in patches in less-than-ideal growing conditions is a bit mysterious at first glance.

In a patch of Pennsylvania sedge, a bit smaller than my dining room table, that I lifted from the space where a house will be built in a couple of years, I found upwards of 500 small corms, ranging in size from around 8mm to as small as 1mm, with most around 3-5mm in height. For tiny corms, they make their homes quite deep in the soil, anywhere from 5cm for the smallest ones to as much as 20cm for the more mature bulbs. Their depth combined with the very fragile stem that connects the leaf to the top of the corm makes transplanting these while they are in leaf a rather risky undertaking. If you are transplanting or dividing them, I highly recommend doing so while they are dormant.

The mystery of their dense populations, when seeds are rare, is explained by a specialized approach to reproduction called ‘droppers’. Like Strawberries, with their stolons that extend from the mother plant and develop a new, eventually independent plant, where they touch the ground, droppers are a specialized stem that grows up from the existing corm at an angle, touch down a short distance away, burrow down into the soil and form a new corm at their tip before withering away entirely. This seems to be their primary form of reproduction which, combined with the limited number of blooming plants in many patches has led to questions about whether there is actually a non-blooming variant of this species that only reproduces by droppers, never maturing to the two leaf, blooming stage. There isn’t a classification for a sub-species or variety on VASCAN for a non-flowering type and I couldn’t find any conclusive information on this either way online.

Hopefully the corms that are being relocated from the dry, sandy soil of the future house site to richer garden and forest settings will help to answer this question in a few years. If they mature to a two leaf, blooming form then the tiny bulbs are tiny due to their youth or to limited resources. If they make use of the increase in resources only by sending out more droppers to increase the patch of single leaf plants then there is a reasonable likelihood that there may, indeed, be a distinct sub-species of non-blooming trout lilies.

Which just goes to show that there is always more to learn about plants.