On a near-freezing morning in early May, a dozen or so people gathered in the small gravel lot of a Fauquier County, Virginia, nature preserve. Wearing woolen garments that should have been stashed away weeks ago, many were also sporting trekking poles, binoculars and long-lens cameras.
As the sun began to peek over the hillside, offering a merciful burst of warmth, Alonso Abugattas called this year’s Trillium Trek to order. The naturalist has led more of these walks than he can remember (somewhere between 20 and 25, he guesses), but he always begins with the same disclaimer.
“We’re going to be moving at a botanical pace today,” he announced. Translation: slow. Going slow ensures that everyone can behold the staggering array of wildflowers in bloom at the G. Richard Thompson Wildlife Management Area, about 62 miles west of Washington. The wildflowers include one of the largest great white trillium stands in the world — about 13 million across two square miles of woods.
The delicate native trillium flowers are why, every spring, this trailhead parking lot is as crammed as a used-car dealership. At the spartan 4,000-acre preserve, frequented mostly by hunters and anglers, visitors won’t find an interpretive center, campground or restroom. They will find, however, one of the region’s most spectacular — and fleeting — displays of natural beauty.
Everyone had the same question: Why do all these flowers grow here?
“This land has never been messed with,” said Abugattas, who spends his workdays as the natural resources manager for Arlington County, Virginia, parks and his free time leading events like this one as the Capitol Naturalist. Because the soil has never been disrupted, he said, it still contains the beneficial fungi and nematodes the flowers rely on to grow. In other words, “the ecological memory is still here.”
Nearly 40 years ago, that memory was almost snuffed out.
In 1990, the agency that owns the preserve, the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, now the Department of Wildlife Resources, was planning a major logging project in the forest that would require heavy machinery to roll over what had long been recognized as a biodiversity hot spot. Alarmed, the Virginia Native Plant Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the appreciation and conservation of native flora, approached the state with a proposition. If the agency managed the land to support the habitat needs of these special plants by restricting logging and recreation in sensitive areas, the Native Plant Society would take on some of the grunt work.
Since then, the organizations have worked in tandem to create a space where trillium and other wildflowers can still thrive. Volunteers regularly remove invasive species, such as Japanese stiltgrass and garlic mustard, while the state oversees the forest for hunters, who in turn keep the deer population in check.
“Trillium are deer candy,” Abugattas said. That’s a big reason the flowers are a rare sight throughout most of the region, where the deer population is surging. “You can’t walk 100 paces without seeing deer damage,” he added.
Where the white trillium grows
After descending the fire road, the group turned back to take in the main event — the trilliums. So far, the flowers had been scattered throughout the forest, but on the Marjorie Arundel Wildflower and Birding Trail, the Trillium grandiflorum dominates the understory, creating a sea of white and pink blossoms.
Trillium comes from the Latin word “tres,” or three, a fitting name for a flower that has three petals, three sepals (leaflike parts that protect the bud before it opens), and three leaves called bracts that perform photosynthesis.
The great white trillium, which has been called “the most showy, best known, and loved of all the trilliums,” is found in deciduous forests across much of the eastern United States. In the Mid-Atlantic, the flower blooms for about two weeks in late April, sporting pure white petals that gradually turn pink, usually after the plant has been pollinated. Trillium grows from thick, horizontal rhizomes and develops slowly, taking about five to seven years to bloom from seed.
One of the trekkers, Carolyn Bednarek, a federal employee from Alexandria, saw her first trillium in the Great Smoky Mountains last year. The trip, she said, reoriented her connection to nature. Bednarek joined an Arlington Regional Master Naturalist program and has been learning everything she can about native wildflowers. “Slowing down, paying attention to things and trying to identify them — that all started with trillium,” she said.
Halfway through the trek, Bednarek marveled at the spectacle. “There are so many. Just the quantity and concentration. It’s wild.”
Wonders along the way
Abugattas said that scheduling the annual walk is a bit of a challenge. Unpredictable weather can affect the timing of the trillium display, and there are other rare plants to take in that bloom on a different schedule.
In fact, some participants come not for the trillium, but for the orchids.
Heather Stevens-Kittner is one. The Arlington resident has been on four Trillium Treks, in part to glimpse the two rare species of orchid in the nature preserve — the yellow lady’s slipper and the showy orchid. “It’s so peaceful and green and lovely,” she said.
Other attendees were more interested in the birds, particularly the species that had recently arrived for the summer: tanagers, American redstarts and warblers of all stripes. These neotropical migrants congregate here in large numbers for the same reason the flowers thrive: fewer deer, meaning more food to forage. In fact, humans can forage at the preserve, too; morels and ramps emerge in April.
But don’t pick the flowers: Orchids and trillium have experienced steep declines, partly because of poaching. Abugattas said that every year he sees divots where trillium has been plucked. (The plants almost never survive being transplanted from the wild.)
Luckily, the limited parking keeps crowds — even during peak trillium bloom — to a minimum.
By the time the group made it back to the gravel lot, the mercury had inched up and a few more cars had squeezed in. Abugattas closed his 20th-something Trillium Trek the way he always does: with an invitation to the Apple House in nearby Linden for apple butter cinnamon doughnuts, another local tradition.
Over 4½ hours, the botanical pace was roughly a quarter-mile an hour. It was the slowest walk many had taken in a long time, but also the most beautiful.
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