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Provincial emblem, watercolor painting
of trilliums
Limited Edition: 450
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!! Trilliums, our provincial
emblem, are borne on single stems with three-part leaves. Sometimes
trilliums pop up in the most unusual places...becoming "comely comrades" of
old, mossy stumps.
Besides the pure white trilliums,
we searched for Jack-in-the-pulpits, low growing violets in hues of blue, yellow, or white, big umbrellas,
clusters of fragile pink mayflowers, yellow dogtooth violets with splotchy
leaves, white Dutchman's breeches
dangling above finely cut greenery, hepaticas whose 'blood' stained our
hands, and crimson trilliums...wonders of the springtime woods!
"Come
over here!" rang out again and again as exciting discoveries were
made!
We couldn't go home, though,
without adding leeks (wild onions) to our 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!
Years later, my husband, Lloyd, photographed
the trilliums and stump in a woods near Woodstock along Highway 401 -
comely comrades! |
