I Have a zilliom plants, but very sparse bloom

Incredible,
I wonder what is different about your plants than mine. There are lots of plants, but very few blooms. Can you describe the conditions? Love the pictures!

Lovely! I planted some last fall and they came up but they are single leafed babies so no blooms this year.

In many natural fields of these, most of the plants are sterile and non-flowering. The flowering ones are much larger bulbs and very deep ganerally. I don't know whether this is a juvenile thing, or whether some never mature to bloom. I have watched a plot along the stream on the front of my land and the same bulbs bloom in the same place every year, but the majority stay one-leaved and flowerless year after year. New bloomers seem to always appear close to already blooming ones so I suspect they are offsets rather than maturing seedlings.

The location of this particular clump has a little morning sun and then shade the rest of the day.There is alot of moss in the area where the bloomers are so whatever conditions moss likes is probably a good spot.It's also pretty wet there.
There are plenty more on the forest floor that don't seem to be blooming and once the Oaks leaf-out they will be in full shade all the time.
I hope this helps, stephen

I've read somewhere the bulbs move down -- maybe they're only mature when the get deep, and then they flower. Beautiful, aren't they?

Ha, here comes interesting information! I have three blooms this year and every plant that has a flower bloomed last year. The catch is I also planted a ton that have not ever bloomed before in very rich moist soil. These bulbs grew much larger and have larger leaves than the ones that are blooming again and many of them are just as deep if not deeper. I like geoforce's theory that only a rare few are able to flower and and the rest are sterile kind of like bees. I have noticed that all the ones that bloom are right next to each other, even touching each other, yet I never see a bunch of blooming plants scattered about amongst non-blooming plants. What purpose this would serve evolutionarily, I have no idea.

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We used to have these everywhere as a kid. I haven't seen one in years here. :(

I transplanted a few of these from my father's property in Vt. to my yard in upstate NY. They seem to like to be in evergreen forest. Where I am, they are beneath some walnuts. Every year there are more of them, but never a bloom.

I thought those were Dogs Tooth Violets

donna_stevens,
trout lily and dogtooth violet are common names for Erythronium americanum, so you're also correct.

Here is a link that might be useful: Conn. Botanical Society page on trout lilies

According to this Virginia website, it takes 4 to 7 years from seed to blooming. I wonder if the plants that are all close together and blooming were spread by offshoot runners? The plants further away could have spread by seed and would take longer to mature.

Shelley

Here is a link that might be useful: Wildflower of the Year 2003: Yellow Trout Lily

I see someone said the trout lily was aka Dog Tooth Violet. But I thought I saw in a book somewhere (Peterson's?) that a dog tooth violet was simply a yellow variation of the wild blue violet.

Just a thought for you all.

We have lots of Trout Lily here in Kent Co, Michigan. They like shaded forest with rich soil, like where the tree leaves have fallen for years and decomposed. The soil is very rich and black and moist.

I attended a lecture on propagating wildflowers a few years ago at Brookside Gardens in Wheaton, MD. One of the few things I remember from the lecture was about trout lilies/ Dog tooth violets. She said that the plants do not flower until their roots hit something solid (like a big rock) that they cannot grow any lower, then they flower. I've been meaning to try it, but I've got to poach some of those flowers which never bloom in a nearby park. I guess the idea was to dig a big hole - maybe 12 inches deep, put in a big rock, say lay a piece of slate, cover up with soil and then plant the trout lily on top of it.

I would love to know if this works.

Cilla

It doesn't work I don't think. I was fortunate to have bought a house with a large patch of the white form of trout lilly on the west side of the house in dry full sun and the soil is mostly gravel. Of the several hundred plants I get only 8-10 flowering stems each year. Because of the gravel the bulbs are very close to the surface and it's quite easy to move the plants so I've spread them throughout the property.

For reference trout lillies have retractile roots. This is what pulls the bulbs deeper into the soil. Wish I could post pictures of my white trouts but our big (18") snow storm on April 24th ruined the flowers before I could get the photos.

Here in southern Ontario the dogtoothed violet aka trout lily grows wild. My backyard woodland plot is chocked full of them... literally a carpet of dogtoothed violet/trout lily and Blue Cohash. Last year we had a dense carpet of both (the Blue Cohash is taller and doesn't disturb the trout lilies. But we put a fence in in the summer and all the foot traffic from building the fence affected the cohash a LOT. This spring the trout lilies and the cohash are much more sparse and not the "carpet" we had in previous years but we are confident that with time and care to keep the kids out of the woodland area that it will come back. It's also been extremely cold this spring which seems to be having an effect as well...lots of plant green but not so much flowering going on.

Barb
s/w Ontario