After a stiff climb in hiking clothes, you may feel a bit underdressed when meeting a painted trillium. This showy debutante sports hunter green leaves beneath ruffled white petals, each with a magenta splash. This combination “has given rise to the suspicion that the fair lady paints her face” joked author Alice Lounsberry in 1899.

Bunchberries seem to enjoy their own company—where there’s one, there’s a dozen, or a hundred, or more. In late May, these cheerful flowers form starry constellations along the trail. Mature plants boast four white petal-like structures that are actually bracts (modified leaves); their true flowers are tiny and clustered in the center.

Once common, many wildflowers have suffered decline due to habitat loss and pressure from non-native invasive species. The AMC’s Mountain Watch Program tracks changes in blooming and fruiting times for alpine flowers each year. Hikers can volunteer to be "citizen scientists" in this program

Although we often imagine orchids in tropical surroundings, they have in fact adapted to almost every habitat. Keen-eyed hikers may find several species along High Peaks trails. The pink ladyslipper is familiar to many, for its range includes most of the eastern U.S. and Canada. The flower has two narrow “wing” petals and a third petal modified into a moccasin-like pouch. Robust and deep rose in milder climates, ladyslippers in the cold boreal forest bloom in frosty pink, and, occasionally, snowy white.

June in the Presidentials
T-shirt season has begun in the valleys before the first flowers appear above treeline on Mount Washington. The alpine plants that grow, bloom, and reproduce here at 4,000 to 6,000-plus feet are heroic in their tenacity. They survive sub-zero temperatures, shearing ice, and world-class wind with only a thin layer of soil in which to anchor. No surprise that many of these plants range north across the Arctic Circle, with names that reference Lapland, Greenland, and the top of the world. For centuries, Mount Washington has been a mecca for scientific and recreational plant-seekers—it is the southernmost station for dozens of species. “I wonder what flowers are already in bloom,” wrote naturalist Bradford Torrey in 1901. “Mountain flowers are quick to answer when the sun speaks to them.”

During the first week in June, summit hikers who trek through hardwood and boreal forest, then above treeline, are right on time for the kickoff of the alpine floral season. Such a reward for a tough climb!

Diapensia is the first to greet you, and indeed it has been the first to flower. Clinging to the most windswept sites, its dark evergreen leaves absorb light and heat, prompting pearly buds into breathtaking bloom. In 1899, botanizer Carry Bigelow enthused, “To my joy I came upon a patch of diapensia—flower of the cold. ...The rocks were covered with close-set tufts of this courageous little plant with its beautiful white flowers looking up to the sky.”

Close by are two other heralds of the alpine renaissance. Lapland rosebay, a tiny rhododendron, demands attention with its oversize purple-pink flowers. Its leaves and branches hunker down in sheltered nooks away from the worst blasts of wind—an attitude familiar to many hikers on these exposed slopes. Crouching, in fact, may help acquaint you with a third early bloomer, the teeny alpine azalea. In this landscape of dwarfed forms, this plant is positively elfin. AMC member Marian Pychowska described these in 1888 as “rare darlings of the cloudland” forming “a rosy carpet of . . . tiny pink stars.”

Photos and descriptions of these and other alpine flowers, as well as birds, amphibians, and mammals you may encounter, are shown in the AMC Field Guide to New England Alpine Summits. With this little book in your knapsack, you can discover them for yourselves.

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