I am a kid again
Last year I came upon some dried seed pods. They were clearly a kind of gentian. You could tell by the shape of the capsules and the little curly parts at the top. Yet they were not any gentian that I was familiar with. Without the flower, I wasn’t able to confidently determine what they were.
I brought a bit of the seed home and had some success growing them. But not really knowing what they were I kind of forgot about them. They grew quietly in a flat amongst some hairy golden aster and culver’s root.
Yesterday I brought my son to visit this site. He’s leaving for college in a fews days, so a bit of bonding seemed in order. On our way back to the car I remembered the gentians. We scoured the tall grass in the area where I remembered seeing them. And there, nestled fairly deep in the tall grass, we found them!
A bit smaller and lighter than downy gentians, these open gentians have a freckled pattern around the opening of their flowers, reminiscent of a starry night sky. After quickly consulting the Minnesota Wildflowers field guide, my excitement only grew! We had come upon a patch of pleated gentian (Gentiana affinis)!
This species was totally new to me! Later I did some further reading on a page published on the Minnesota DNR website. Pleated gentian, it turns out, is listed as a species of special concern in Minnesota. It exists in only a few prairie remnants in the far western portion of the state. It grows more abundantly in alpine meadows, bog edges, and open forests clear on the other side of the Great Plains. A spirit of the west, of the mountains, growing here on the edge of my home territory.
They apparently require some specialized growing conditions that are not well understood. According to the DNR, they tend to be “restricted to narrow ecotones that occur along moisture gradients. Most of the occurrences of wet saline prairie are in zones of wet prairie located adjacent to glacial Lake Agassiz beach ridges, and the zones of salt accumulation are often associated with the shallow toeslopes of the beach ridges.”
That’s pretty specific.
We had made it half way back to the main trail before my patient son had to watch me go dashing back to the place we had found them. I needed more photos! My mind was now racing. What will become of the ones that I have started? Will they survive outside of these specialized environments? There is so much I don’t know. And so, the prairie education continues!
