The Joyful Botanist: Oh Phacelia, You’re Breaking My Heart
Fringed phacelia blooming in profusion like a snowy carpet on the forest floor.
Adam Bigelow photo
A trip through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is a beautiful, often nervous drive, as hundreds of thousands of tourists visit every year, and most do not know how to drive in the mountains. This is especially true trying to navigate winding mountain roads while looking at all of the long-range views.
Riding with me through the park in springtime brings different risks, due to me trying to see every single wildflower blooming along the side of the road. Tiny flashes of color force me to crane my neck looking for cranesbill geranium (Geranium carolinianum), and roadside toothworts (Cardamine diphylla) bring a big smile to my face.
I’m a safe driver most of the time but will admit to almost driving off the road after passing by a whole field of fringed phacelia (Phacelia fimbriata). This delicate white flower with five petals, each having distinctive fringes at the tip, gives the look of freshly fallen snow when blooming in abundance. While according to the artist Prince it sometimes snows in April, I’d prefer to see the snow cover of fringed phacelia over frozen precipitation.
There are six species of phacelia that grow in North Carolina, and all but two can be found in mountain counties. Phacelia bipinnatifida is known in English as purple phacelia or fernleaf phacelia due to its highly dissected leaves and purple flower clusters. This species of phacelia likes to grow on boulders and rocks in just the thinnest of soils.
Another mountainous phacelia is Miami-mist (Phacelia purshii), which gets its name from the indigenous Miami people of the Great Lakes region, and the fact that the small flowers look like a light fog or mist covering a valley floor. Another common name is purple scorpionweed, or what I would rename purple scorpionflower. While not really a host for scorpions — and yes, there are Appalachian scorpions — this common name is from the type of flower cluster or inflorescence that is called a scorpioid cyme.
The fourth phacelia in Western North Carolina is one that I am dubious I’ve seen in the woods, and that is the Appalachian phacelia, a.k.a. smallflower phacelia (Phacelia dubia). While common in much of its range, this species of phacelia is infrequently observed in the state. Smallflower phacelia gets that common name honestly, as each flower on the inflorescence is less than a half-inch wide.
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Fringed phacelias are pollinated mostly by small native bees. Their fruit, set shortly after pollination and released just before these winter-germinating annual plants, die back for the year in the form of dry, hard capsules that split open to drop the seeds. Next year’s flowers will come from this year’s seeds.
Fringed phacelia enjoys growing in rich soils in deciduous shade, often growing in abundance under towering trees whose leaves have not emerged, taking advantage of the sunlight hitting the forest floor before the canopy leafs out for the year.
I encourage you to get yourself into the Smokies to go look for these and other spring wildflowers. I mean, if you’re not walking in the woods looking at wildflowers at this time of year, you are missing out on one of the beautiful wonders of nature. Just be careful driving to the trailheads and pull-offs, as there might be a carload of botanists try to see every flower without driving off a cliff.
(The Joyful Botanist leads weekly wildflower walks most Fridays and offers consultations and private group tours through Bigelow’s Botanical Excursions. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
