Trout Lily

Some of PEI’s rarest and most interesting plants are a bit like your favourite seasonal foods: you can only find them for a short time each year. I’ve written about a few of our spring ephemerals before but want to introduce you to one more: the beautiful Trout Lily (Erythronium americanum). 

Photo: Trout Lily (Erythronium americanum) on PEI.

Spring ephemerals are perennial plants that appear in April and May, complete their entire life cycle within a few weeks, and then disappear for the rest of the year. This is a hard time of year to make a living if you’re a plant, but mycorrhizal fungi help many spring ephemerals absorb nutrients from the still-cool soil. 

There are two key advantages to this lifestyle. First – and most importantly – spring ephemerals benefit from lots of early season sunlight hitting the forest floor. Deciduous trees are leafless, shrubs have just barely started, ferns are still fiddleheads, and sunlight can reach the ground, warm it up, and be used by plants that wake up before these others.  

Second is the botanical version of ‘the early bird catches the worm’, or in this case the pollinator. These early-flowering plants support a range of native pollinators; for Trout Lilies, this includes a variety of Miner Bees in the genus Andrena, as well as Bumble Bees and Sweat Bees. In another couple of weeks, showy flowers will be a dime a dozen, and it will be harder to catch pollinators’ attention.

Few plants get their 15 minutes of fame, but PEI’s Trout Lilies did back in 2020. At the time, there were no known records of this species in our Province, and it wasn’t included on any of the official plant lists. But Laura O’Connor remembered collecting it as part of a science project when she was at Rollo Bay Consolidated School in the early 1990s, a student of the late Kevin MacAdam. Amazingly, she still had the collection and – sure enough – Trout Lily was in it!  A great example of the importance of citizen science.

Since that time, Trout Lily has been found in a handful of other locations in Eastern and Central PEI. This is a distinctive, easy-to-recognize plant that’s worth keeping an eye out for in early spring. Leaves are mottled with brownish spots that, to some, resemble those on Brook Trout (hence the common name), though to me the pattern looks more like dappled sunlight.

Each plant produces a single yellow, nodding flower with six petals that eventually curl upwards to reveal brick-red, pollen-bearing anthers. (Some plants lack the red pigment and produce bright yellow anthers and pollen, though we don’t yet know if there is any ecological significance to this). One Trout Lily flower can produce 5 to 10 seeds, and – like many of our spring ephemerals – this species hires ants to help disperse them.

To attract the ants and pay them for their service, each Trout Lily seed has a tiny food packet (called an ‘elaiosome’) attached. Ants are attracted to the fats and proteins of the elaiosome and carry it and the seed back to their colony. They eat the elaiosome and then toss the seed in the colony’s waste-disposal area – a nitrogen-rich spot conveniently well-suited to seed germination. This plant-animal relationship is called ‘myrmecochory’ and it’s used by about one-third of our woodland wildflowers including Lilies, Violets, and Trilliums.

Despite all this effort to ensure seed dispersal, Trout Lilies also spread vegetatively and it’s common to find large patches of them.  Although they can be locally abundant, it is important to remember that Trout Lilies are provincially rare and known from only a few locations. This rarity is due to habitat loss: these are plants of unploughed forests and intact riparian zones, and don’t grow on sites that have been extensively disturbed. But where conditions are right, you can find hundreds or thousands of individuals.

As a final note, Trout Lilies are edible, but I don’t recommend foraging them on PEI. First – and most importantly – is the aforementioned rarity: sustainable foraging means using only what’s common. If that’s not enough to convince you, know that Trout Lily is emetic – it causes vomiting. The effect varies from person to person, with some reportedly able to eat bunches of leaves without problem and others getting sick from just a leaf or two. There’s lots of common, edible wild greens around this time of year and no need to pick our rare Trout Lilies.

Now and over the next few weeks is a great time to look for these beautiful wildflowers in the Island’s mixed hardwood forests and along our streams and rivers. If you do find them, I’d love to know, or you can upload a photo to iNaturalist. That’s a great way to learn, explore, and reconnect with PEI – Untamed!