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Back to Blogging: Trilliums Under the Steps

 Posting again first time since 2017.  Watershed Plants needs an easy to use blog format. This would work, and what I started in 2009 was it, still doing now. 


Trilliums under the stairs at the Bothell house. Now is the time to transplant some of the bulbs.Its not very hard, I've done it before, it works, so why not?  Because trilliums are so precious, so fragile, and if you pick one it will die for seven years.  No, its if you ever pick one you will kill it forever and never will you ever see such beauty again.  Something like that was the story when I was young and once in a great while I observed an actual trillium in a forest, and was told in no uncertain terms that such a flower was never to be picked.  I can't actually hear one of my parents saying that, and I sure don't remember any trilliums ever blooming in the backyard, though they could have been around somewhere. So maybe it wasn't from my parents or other adults around; it was more like true general knowledge. 

So when I found trilliums coming up under the front steps of a house we moved into in 1994, when our son was age 3, daughter age 11, and I was so busy driving to work and daycare and back and so on that I may not have even noticed the trilliums at first -- but when I did see them, it was just one of those wonderful events that sometimes happen and you just let it be.  Do nothing, and see what will happen.

I did nothing and they kept appearing year after year.  Didn't water them, didn't rake, weed, mulch, plant or dig around, just did nothing and let the dappled shade, the needles and cones from the firs, and the dampish nothern side of the house create the place where trilliums would grow.

Opps, I just remembered.  That porch and steps was not the same when we moved here in 1994.  My husband rebuilt the stairs and added the porch, maybe the trilliums didn't show up until after that. When was that anyway?  


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