Charmer

It’s a good thing I was hunting so carefully for interesting things in the woods last week or I might have walked right past this charming wildflower.

Isn’t this plant lovely? My field guide calls it “tall cordyalis,” but many sources refer to it as “rock harlequin,” including this webpage. I like that name better, so rock harlequin it is. My field guide says that rock harlequin’s habitat is rocky clearings, and that’s consistent with the two places that I found it growing (in all but one of the pictures above you can see rock behind or under the plant). I found quite a few of these plants once I starting looking specifically for them. Most weren’t in bloom, perhaps because rock harlequin doesn’t bloom until its second summer. Also, the bloom time is supposed to be April-September, but it’s late October now, so maybe these particular specimens were just outliers. The flowers, though beautiful and brightly-colored, are small, so the leaves are in their own way more of an attention-grabber. But, whichever part of it makes you take a closer look, you’ll be glad that you did.