One recent morning, I was walking on the rail trail in South Amherst when something in the sun-dappled underbrush caught my eye. A dot of burgundy, then another. I stopped to look more closely and all at once there appeared a small multitude of trilliums gathered around the base of a mature maple tree.
These are Trillium erectum, also known as wood lily, red trillium or purple trillium, native to the woodlands of the northeastern United States and Canada. The plant has three prominent leaves, in the center of which is a single flower with three petals and three sepals. The plant’s flowers have a fetid smell; some compare it to the odor of rotting meat or a wet dog. This unpleasant scent attracts carrion flies and beetles. The plant has no nectar, but the insects carry the pollen from plant to plant, and if successfully pollinated, a dark red berry-like seed capsule appears after the petals have wilted. The seeds of trillium are often spread by mice and ants. It takes around two years for a seed to germinate and seven years to mature and bloom. Given this lengthy lifecycle, it’s not surprising that many states have made it illegal to pick trillium in the wild. (I wasn’t able to find any authoritative information about legal protections of wildflowers in Massachusetts.)
The Trillium erectum has several nicknames including wake robin, drawn from the resemblance between its red flower and the red breast of the robin as it wakes each spring. Another common nickname of the plant is “Stinking Benjamin.” I imagined that someone coined the name in reference to some unkempt elderly uncle. But not so. According to Ellen Rathbone, an Adirondacks naturalist, “Benjamin” is a corruption of the word benzoin, which itself is a corruption of the word benjoin, a plant-based organic compound used in the manufacture of perfume. Many years ago I was involved in a lawsuit regarding the piracy of top-secret perfume ingredients and learned entirely too much about esoteric perfume formulas. But I don’t recall that essence of trillium was one of the purloined substances.
Various Native American peoples considered trilliums a sacred plant. They brewed trillium root tea that was used to ease labor and childbirth and menstrual problems. This gave rise to the name birthroot, which turned into bethroot. Warriors carried trillium root into battle and chewed it to give them strength and protection. Some ground the entire plant into a poultice to treat tumors, inflammation and ulcers. The leaves are poisonous and should not be consumed.
Trilliums have captivated many literary imaginations. Emily Dickinson was passionate about trilliums and cultivated them in her garden. Presumably she collected specimens from the wild, a practice that is much frowned upon now. Her friend Emily Fowler Ford recalled excursions to nearby Mount Norwottock where they would gather armfuls of pink and white trilliums. “She knew the wood-lore of the region round about,” wrote Ford, “and could name the haunts and habits of every wild or garden growth within her reach.”
Dickinson associated certain flowers with close friends and family members, and she paired trilliums with her brother, Austin. “The Woods lend Austin Trilliums,” she wrote in a letter to a friend in May 1883. In her book The Gardens of Emily Dickinson, Judith Farr speculated that Dickinson saw her brother, the only male of the three Dickinson siblings and his father’s heir, as the center, like the single three-petaled flower of the trillium, holding forth above the triad of leaves.
In one of his many wonderful essays on gardening, Allen Lacy described his dream garden, funded by “an imaginary kinsman and benefactor” who would underwrite a “payroll to hire a crew of crabgrass vigilantes and lawn wizards” and the “cost of making whatever garden I would like to have.” Beyond the waves of spring peonies, summer lilies, delphiniums and the rest, he imagines an exit from the formal perennial beds where a path would lead over a stone bridge and ‘through a woodland of hemlocks and beeches and oaks to places where wild trilliums and lady’s slippers grow, a retreat from all symmetry and formality.”
In her poem “Trillium,” Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Glück recognized the bittersweet ephemerality of the spring woodland flower:
When I woke up I was in a forest. The dark
seemed natural, the sky through the pine trees
thick with many lights.
I knew nothing; I could do nothing but see.
And as I watched, all the lights of heaven
faded to make a single thing, a fire
burning through the cool firs.
Then it wasn’t possible any longer
to stare at heaven and not be destroyed.
If you want to see trilliums, and for that matter lady’s slippers, you should seek them out now. Unlike William Wordsworth’s host of golden daffodils, these spring wonders are subtle and short-lived. You’ll miss them if you’re power-walking or biking at breakneck speed. They graciously reward our contemplative attention to nature’s quiet gifts.
Mickey Rathbun is an Amherst-based writer. Her latest book, The Real Gatsby: George Gordon Moore, A Granddaughter’s Memoir, was published in 2024 by White River Press.