Few things are as refreshing as a warm spring day after a long, cold, rainy winter. Okay, so our spring days in the Columbia-Pacific region are often still cold and rainy. But they’re comparatively less so, and they bring with them the first of the year’s wildflowers. Who doesn’t appreciate these splashes of color amid the bright green of leaf buds?

Some of these flowers may be from nonnative plants like daffodils, dandelions or English lawn daisies. But we’re starting to see some native flowers as well, like osoberry, stream violet and Nuttall’s toothwort.

Perhaps the most celebrated of our early spring native wildflowers is the Pacific trillium.

This species is only found west of the Great Plains, while its cousin, the large white trillium, grows in forests east of the Plains. Mixed conifer forests across the Pacific Northwest are full of these singular blooms consisting of three large, rounded bracts, a specialized type of leaf that often frames a flower. The three petals of the flower alternate with three green sepals. 

When it first blooms, the flower is white, but as it ages it deepens in color to red or purple.

Unsurprisingly, all members of the genus Trillium have parts in threes, hence the name. Look closely at the center of a trillium flower, and you’ll notice that the yellow pollen-colored anthers are arranged in a ring of six, surrounding a trio of pistils.

What we see as the stem of the trillium is a scape or peduncle, which are two terms for the stemlike structure that supports a single flower, such as the slender thread connecting a cherry or apple flower to the tree’s branch. In most plants, the stem is above ground and produces however many scapes are appropriate to its species, but the trillium only breaches the soil where the scape begins. 

Trilliums have rhizomes rather than roots, and the rhizome is the plant’s actual stem. Beneath the surface of the soil, the rhizome grows nodes and internodes. These nodes are places where leaves would normally grow, while the internodes are the sections of stem between them. And instead of root tips, the rhizome ends in axillary buds. 

So, in short, all we see of the trillium is its flower, stretching from the soil past the leaflike bracts to the petals and sepals, while the plant’s stem remains underground with its rhizome. But most people just refer to the scape as a stem and the bracts as leaves.

The bracts serve the same purpose as proper leaves, using photosynthesis to turn sunlight into food. This allows the plant to regain stored energy that was used to grow the flower in spring. 

If the flower, bracts and all, is picked, trampled or knocked over, the rhizome may not receive enough energy to grow a flower the following year, or if it does, the flower may be much smaller. In many cases, the plant dies, which means picking a trillium is likely a death sentence for it.

Even so, a trillium may not bloom every year. It may take a single plant up to a decade to reach maturity, going through growth phases where it develops one bract, then three bracts without a flower, and finally the bracts with flowers that are the subject of so many nature photographs. 

A trillium may also go dormant for up to five years, and in a given year, about one-fourth of mature trilliums are dormant rather than flowering.

We have insect pollinators to thank for the continued existence of trilliums, though the nonnative European honeybee is not among them. Instead, several species of native moth, bumblebee and beetle all visit this flower for nectar, and spread pollen from plant to plant in the process. 

Once the fruit is ripe, native ants carry them away, eat them, and leave the seeds on the ground where they will germinate the following year. 

Because of these intricate relationships among native species, the Pacific trillium is best found in well-established mixed conifer forests with great biodiversity. 

It can take several decades for a clearcut forest to recover enough to host trillium again, and it is much less likely to do so if the landscape is simply replanted with one type of tree, only to be mowed down again in a few decades. 

The older and more mature the forest, the more likely it is to have an abundance of trilliums, and this is the best time of year to go looking for these delicate floral beauties.

Rebecca Lexa is a naturalist, nature educator, tour guide and writer in the Pacific Northwest. Her forthcoming book, “The Everyday Naturalist: How to Identify Animals, Plants, and Fungi Wherever You Go,” will be released in June.