Something beautiful is happening in Nova Scotias forests – TheChronicleHerald.ca

MEADOW GREEN, N.S.

If you are wise enough to find yourself wandering a river under old hardwoods over the coming days, look down.

Because while it is good to be wise, it is better to be lucky.

And if you are both, you will see a wide carpet of flowering blood root.

Out toward the fringe of the flowers, the dutchmans breeches may be swinging on their green line.

The nodding trillium, however, most likely wont be quite yet roused from its slumber to welcome the bees.

Give it another week.

Our man-made hybrids are just clumsy when compared to a wildflower, said Bruce Partridge on Tuesday.

Its like comparing a deer to a cow.

Small flowers are blooming now in our old forests.

It is a display of beauty made all the more precious for its being so fleeting.

A few more warm days and the blood root, which bleeds bright red when cut, and the dutchmans breeches, named by some forgotten soul who saw in their aspect a pair of shorts hung out to dry, will be done with flowering.

Because to be elegant is to be parsimonious in both form and presence.

They are just enough flower to attract the bumbling bees without exposing themselves unnecessarily to wind, rain and frost.

They are with us just long enough to get pollinated.

And their symmetrical beauty is enough to confoundthe arguments of Charles Darwins followers that survival is natures only polestar.

Next to bloom will be the nodding trilliums and the yellow violets, then the blue bead lily and the jack in the pulpits.

Then it will be June and the leaves of the elderly sugar maple and ash trees will be fully formed and stealing the sun.

Down where the East Pomquet River wends through Meadow Green, Antigonish County, the fiddleheads and sensitive ferns will unfurl themselves and grab whats left of the energy produced by a nuclear furnace 150 million kilometres away.

And the floor of this small copse of old forest will be shadowy and damp until winters return.

These are just the lowland flowers, said Partridge.

Theres also the flowers of the upland hardwoods, coniferous forest, the Guysborough bogs. Each has its own florae and each is just as amazing and just as complicated.

Partridge discovered this patch of wildflowers while out walking the Meadow Greens unpaved main three decades ago.

Trained as a botanist in Utah before lifes meandering path saw him building a homestead and raising children and plants in Antigonish County, he recognized the wildflower from a picture in a book.

When the first settlers came they were everywhere, said Partridge.

Theres only the tiniest fraction left after all our land clearing and cutting. Its not really fair to pin blame because hardly anyone pays attention to what their wheels drive over.

They arent just pretty flowers.

They are the now preciously rare signs of an untrammeled ecosystem.

These wildflowers spread primarily by their roots. This patch of blood root on this bend of the East Pomquet River could be a thousand years old.

So could the ferns whose root systems overlay and intertwine with that of the flowers and the towering hardwoods overhead.

Those like Partridge who make a life seeking to understand these places do not walk on the earth.

They walk between a living system for the gathering of water and nutrients and another for the inhaling of light and carbon dioxide.

He tried for years to breed these flowers from seed, failing season after season.

Then watching the ants carry the seeds, that have these fatty flaps to attract them, you realize its something they do or are involved in, said Partridge.

The find on that morning walk led to a rekindling of his fascination with these flowers.

It led him and his wife Mary to start Borealis Wildflowers a mail-order seed catalogue.

Though he survived a long battle with cancer, the company didnt.

And ever since beating the terminal prognosis of the disease, hes seen in these flowers a wisdom.

They are above the earth long enough to do what needs to be done.

They are beautiful while they are here.

And then they are gone.

They know where they stand, said Partridge, 72.

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Something beautiful is happening in Nova Scotias forests - TheChronicleHerald.ca