Rebecca Writes

 

 

Here in the Yukon, the first sign of spring’s new plant life is the lavender of the pasque flowers.* We most often call them crocuses, but while they look a bit like crocuses and bloom first thing in the spring like crocuses do, they are not really crocuses.

 

Several of the common names for this wildflower point to it’s early blooming, like May Day flower, Easter flower, and spring crocus. We’d have to include pasque flower in that list, too, since the word pasque refers to Easter or the Passover. The Blackfoot Indians called these flowers napi, which translates to “old man” in English. If you look at the photograph above, you’ll can see why they found this name appropriate. More officially, they’re called pulsatilla vulgaris, which makes them sound a little naughty. However, vulgaris simply means they are the vulgar (or common) form of the pulsatilla family, the flower family so-named because of the pulsing dance the blossoms do in the spring wind.

These wind-waving beauties aren’t called common for nothing. You’ll find wild pasque flowers across western North America, from Utah up through Alaska and as far west as Illinois. They prefer the prairies as habitat, and two prairie places—South Dakota and Manitoba—have named the pasque flower their official flower. Here in the boreal forest, look for them in clearings of wooded foothills.

Sometimes people try to transplant these lovely lavender wildflowers to their home gardens, but more often than not, this doesn’t work. These are plants that prefer their soil hard and untilled, and the soil found in flower beds is just too cushy for them. But my neighbor with the perfect yard and garden did manage to grow a couple of wild pasque flowers in her wildflower garden, although she had to wait several years before her plants bloomed.

 

It’s because they don’t grow well in cultivated soil that there is some worry that as more and more land is tilled for farming in the prairies, the pasque flower may eventually disappear altogether from the grasslands there. However, since most of the areas where crocuses grow in the Yukon are no good for either farming or building, and naturally hard soil is our specialty, there’s not much chance they’ll die out here.

 

The biggest enemy of the Yukon pasque flower is enthusiastic children, especially little girls, who can’t resist them and love to bring them home to their mothers by the ice-cream-bucketful. At least that’s they way things went at our house.

*The green in the photo is the evergreen bearberry plant. A few more pasque flower photos here, here, here, and here.