Pennsylvania Game News - June 2010 - 54

The Naturalist’s Eye
By Marcia Bonta

Pennsylvania Hiking Week

Y THE TIME my husband Bruce and I learned that our 13-year-old granddaughter Eva was going to spend the summer with us, most of the state park cabins were booked up. But we were able to snag a few days at Hills Creek State Park, between Mansfield and Wellsboro, in northcentral Tioga County. We had hoped to celebrate Pennsylvania Hiking Week the last nine days in May, when the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources teams up with the Keystone Trails Association and offers nearly 100 organized hikes and walks throughout Pennsylvania in state parks, forests and other publicly owned lands. But our cabin wasn’t available until May 31, and we spent most of that day en route, although we did stop at Little Pine State Park to picnic and hike its Lakeshore Trail on our own. It turned out that no organized hikes had been offered at Hills Creek State Park, anyway. But the park proved to be a jewel of a place, lightly occupied by a few campers who know a good park when they see it and aim to keep it that way. The 407-acre park has a 137-acre lake as its focal point, and it was around that lake that we hiked the following day on Lake Side Trail. Once again we were in the Allegheny Plateau area, and once again we saw wildflowers and birds that don’t blossom or nest on our Ridge-and-Valley mountaintop. Luckily for us, Eva was as interested in the plants and wildlife as we were so, technically, our hike was more of a ramble, with frequent stops to admire the wildflowers and wild critters we encountered both on the trail and in the lake. Underneath the large hemlocks and white pines we found what I always think of as “northern wildflowers” — starflower,
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painted trillium, goldthread, clintonia, Canada mayflower and bunchberry — because they all grew in the conifer forest beside the central Maine lakeshore property we owned from 1966 until 1971, when we moved to Pennsylvania. Starflower (Trientalis borealis) with its terminal whorl of various sized, shiny, tapering leaves are topped by one to three small, 6- or 7-pointed, white star-shaped flowers on thin stalks. Also called “chickweed” and “wintergreen,” starflowers thrive in moist woods and bogs. Once, after a blowdown in our hollow, I found a starflower that was protected by fallen limbs, but after the limbs rotted, the starflower disappeared. Every spring I walk the streambanks hunting for another, but so far, I’ve been unsuccessful. Yet at Hills Creek State Park, we found dozens of them, many with three blossoms. Goldthread has only one small, white star-shaped flower. As Joseph Harned writes in Wildflowers of the Alleghanies, “The beauty of this plant lies in its shining leaves, which partly hide among bog moss or grow in large numbers about the roots of old pine trees in moist woods.” Those evergreen leaves are divided into three parts and resemble jagged-edged 3-leaf clovers. Both its genus name Coptis, which is Greek for “to cut” and its species name trifolia or “3leaved” describe the leaves. But its common name refers to its threadlike, bright yellow rhizomes below ground. I was probably the most thrilled to see clintonia in bloom — the Clintonia borealis, also known as “corn-lily,” “dogberry” and “blue bead lily.” This was not the clintonia that grows in our hollow — Clintonia umbellulata — with its umbel of white flowers, but the clintonia of the north
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Pennsylvania Game News - June 2010

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