Seeing the trilliums bloom always makes me feel spring has truly and finally arrived, especially after a long, hard winter like we just experienced here in Michigan.
I first remember seeing them when we regularly visited the northwestern portion of the state's Lower Peninsula early each June. Later, I found them blooming in a nature area in metro Detroit where I often went for a walk after working in a nearby business.
More recently, I took photos of a batch of the flowers near the wetlands in back of my parents' former home when I noticed them enjoying a particularly prolific season of blooming the last May my mother lived there.

There are several varieties of this plant, a member of the lily family and considered an herb that grows from rhizomes.

They generally bloom from mid-May through early June in Michigan.
In Michigan, the painted trillium variety occurs in fewer than a dozen places, but the more common, large-flowered trillium is easier to find throughout the state if you know where to look.
We last spotted a nice batch of trilliums early last June when we visited Michigan's Upper Peninsula and the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, where plentiful patches of the showy white flowers bloomed right along the roads and highways through the park.

As prolific as they may appear in certain places and at certain times of the year, Michigan and Minnesota strictly regulate or outright prohibit planting or picking the flowers because officials consider several specific trillium species as endangered or threatened.
Well meaning folks can kill the entire plant by picking the flowers, even if they leave the rhizomes intact. That means tens of millions of the flowers have already disappeared from the woods because careless collectors killed the plants as they picked or dug them up from the wild throughout the years.

Ohio considers the trillium as somewhat rare, and the large white trillium is the state's official wildflower.
The white trillium is the emblem and official flower of Ontario, and it was that common connection between the Canadian province and the state of Ohio that led to a good-natured competition between professional Major League Soccer teams in Toronto, Canada and Columbus, Ohio.
The Trillium Cup contest is an annual rivalry established in 2008 between the Columbus Crew and the Toronto FC teams. The team scoring the most points during games between the two teams by the season's end takes home the title. Columbus took home the cup every season through 2013 except for 2011.

The contest for us this year is to find another favorite trillium patch close to home as we lost access to seeing the plants at my parents' former home and the nearby nature center where I liked to walk.
Sounds like a good excuse to go out hiking in the woods with our cameras soon!
Want to learn more about trilliums and other wildflowers here in Michigan and Ohio? Check out Wildflowers of Ohio, Second Edition by Robert L. Henn or Michigan Wildflowers in Color, Revised Edition with Wildflower Walks by Harry C. Lund.
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