

Most years I write about the magical trillium flowers that bloom around here each spring. Last year I wrote about our yearly trillium walk in the woods. Well, guess what? B discovered some trillium seeds last year sometime in late spring or early summer. It felt like a truly magical find, and he put them in a seed packet to save for planting this year.
He also told me that ants help to spread trillium seeds, which I thought was so cool. A friend shared a wonderful field guide with us called ‘Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast: Washington, Oregon, British Columbia & Alaska’ by Pojar and MacKinnon.
Here’s a write-up about ants spreading trillium seeds from the book:
“Each seed has a little, oil-rich appendage that is attractive to ants. The ants lug the seeds back to their nests, where they eat the appendages or feed them to the larvae and then discard the remaining seeds on their rubbish piles. This is a reasonably effective mechanism for seed dispersal, especially for plants of the dim, becalmed forest floor. Ants disperse up to 30% of the spring-flowering, herbaceous species in the deciduous forests of eastern North America. Our forest flora is less dependent, but we do have several spring-flowering ‘ant plants,’ including bleeding heart, inside-out flower and wild ginger, as well as trilliums.”
I thought that was really neat, and that some of you might enjoy learning about that too! Wouldn’t you just love to witness a tiny ant carrying a trillium seed back to it’s nest?