May 4

Trillium in bloom.

Several years ago, the college took it upon themselves to raze a long-standing productive vegetable field and adjacent wood that were located next to the campus. They did this to create a parking lot to serve a new dormitory building.

This was a bitter event for the neighbors, who had enjoyed what was a two-track path that skirted the edge of the field alongside the dividing woods. For years, we enjoyed taking the dogs on this track, letting them wander off leash ahead as we simply hiked along observing the successional changes to the field and woods.

There was a spot we knew, just when the edge of the field began and the woodland edging thinned enough to receive more sunlight, that we looked each May to find a small patch of blood-red Trillium, or wake robin, growing set back a few yards into the undergrowth of the woods. The bulldozers destroyed all this, when the land was cleared.

Today I took the dogs down to this area, and we walked along the outlying periphery of the parking lot, as there remains a small buffer of trees perhaps 10 feet wide that separates the college’s land from the active farm fields to the north. In nearly this same area, we discovered the trillium again as a small patch of perhaps 10’ by 10’ growing hidden within deadfall branches that had been rudely piled onto the berm.

I am happy to see these secretive flowers, whose blood-red, three petal blossoms are distinctive, much in the way the spiderwort that flourishes in June has petal colors that are cast in sharp relief against the anthers of golden yellow.

These trillium are a welcome sign of resiliency in my mind.