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My first encounter with spring ephemerals in Toronto’s wooded ravines was slow in coming, I am embarrassed to admit. The brief, spectacular flowering of forest floor herbs in the short window between spring thaw and tree leaf-out is one of the wonders of the deciduous forest in North America.

I’d been here at least ten years before I finally got down into the Don Valley at the right time of year. Perhaps I was lured out by one of those uncharacteristically warm and sunny early April days. The crocus were up in the beds at home; so maybe, I reasoned, the woodland ephemerals would also be blooming in the valley.