Yellow Trout-lily - A Lily of Many Aliases
Stanwyn G. Shetler
The great lily family flourishes in springtime in our gardens and in our native hills and hollows. Whether you skip through April's garden among the snowdrops, daffodils, and tulips or walk in April's sunlit woods amid entrancing drifts of trilliums or trout-lilies, spring would not be spring in Virginia without the lily kin.
(Photo by Robert W. Poole and Used by Kind Permission)
Yellow trout-lily, Erythronium americanum, a Paul Revere of spring, is a signature member of that band of ephemerals of the forest floor that march through their life cycles and disappear for another year almost before you have time to notice them. It is one of the earliest to send up its leaves- broad, yellowish to dark green, pointed tongues dappled with brownish maroon spots and flowers soon after. Some would say that these leaves, which suddenly arch above the dried leaf litter like a serpent's tongue and virtually pant for sunshine, are the basis for one of the plant's well-known common names, "adder's-tongue." Personally, I suspect it was the extruding stamens of the flower that, to some name-coiner long ago, conjured up the darting tongue of a snake poised to strike.
The trout-lily has more vernacular aliases than a scam artist, bespeaking its widespread occurrence and popularity as a wildflower. Each features some prominent characteristic of the plant. Most apt are "trout-lily" and "fawn-lily," said to have been coined by naturalist John Burroughs to replace the inappropriate name "dogtooth-violet." Indeed, the plant is a lily by affinity, and its nodding 1-2-inch flowers that bloom a mere 5-10 inches above the ground are shaped like miniature lilies. Why "trout"? Maybe because the flowers bloom at the beginning of trout season, maybe because the mottled leaves suggest the speckled sides of a brook or brown trout. Why "fawn"? The up- thrusting, mottled leaves suggest the fawn's spots, and to some the two basal leaves that flank the solitary flower on its naked, 4-6-inch scape also mimic the fawn's erect ears.
Probably the earliest English name was dogtooth-violet, originally applied to the European species, Erythronium dens-canis, first described by Linnaeus. Its white corm was fancied to look like a dog's tooth, hence the dens-canis. Erythronium referred to the red or purplish flower, suggesting a violet. Of the approximately two dozen species of Erythronium worldwide, nearly all are North American, and almost all the American ones are yellow- or white-flowered. Thus, while the "dogtooth" shape of the corm applies as well to the North American species, the "violet" color of the flower mostly does not.
From seed to blooming takes 4-7 years, and a mature plant may not bloom every year. The corm gets larger and goes deeper into the soil the older it gets, sometimes going down well over a foot. Until the corm reaches flowering size, it produces only a single, ground-level leaf per season. Flowering plants bear two basal leaves. The species spreads not only by seeds but also by offshoot runners from the corms, forming extensive clonal colonies, carpeting the forest. Most plants in any given colony are single-leaved, not yet reproductively mature. In one study the colonies were found to average nearly 150 years in age and were as old as 1,300 years.
The yellow flowers track the sun and more or less close at night. The three sepals (outer whorl), which may be tinged with brownish red on the outside, and three petals (inner whorl), which may be spotted at the base inside, are otherwise similar In bright sunlight all may recurve so strongly as to give the flower an almost spherical look.
The yellow trout-lily grows in moist deciduous upland and especially bottomland woods and even in meadows almost throughout the eastern states and adjacent Canada. In Virginia it can be found in most counties, often in profusion. It blooms primarily in April.
Most of the 22 American species of Erythronium are western. A second yellow species, E. umbilicatum, has been recognized recently in the Southeast, which occurs less commonly in Virginia than E. americanum. The two are separated by small technical differences. The wide-ranging midwestern white trout-lily, E. albidum, reaches Virginia only in the Washington, D.C., area along the Potomac River.
Stanwyn G. Shetler is Curator of Botany Emeritus at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.Back to Articles IndexHe serves on the Board of Friends of Banshee Reeks, and is also Virginia Native Plant Society's (VNPS) Botany Chair.
This article, slightly revised here, first appeared in the November 2002 'Bulletin' of the Virginia Native Plant Society and is reprinted by permission. The yellow trout lily is the Society's Wildflower of the Year for 2003.