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Crocus field
Tisdale - Thursday, May 16, 2013
by:Ken Jones
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Crocuses are out they were spotted on May 08, 2013.

For the past years I have been coming to the same location to photograph these spring wonders of nature.

To find the site you have to travel north out of Regina on Highway No. 6 to the Qu Appelle Valley. This spot is approximately twenty-five miles from Regina.

At bottom of valley turn Left on Highway 99 where the pavement goes to gravel, then travel three quarters of a mile west, past two bridges on your left, look to your right to see little fuzzy clumps in the pasture and you have crocuses.

Images shown here were taken at approximately 5:50 pm, May 08, 2013.

The camera used here is a Canon 7D with a 100 mm macro lens. All of the pictures were shot on a tripod because I was dealing with a 15 km wind.

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Editor’s notes on the crocus: When Europeans settled in North America there were many things that looked a lot like things they would see back home and some of course, were totally unique. Some examples included the ubiquitous robin that we all associate with the first bird to show up each spring, a week or two after the crows return. Crows are part of the corvus family of birds, ravens, magpies and crows which are found all around the world, but the robin is a northern european bird. The European settlers thought the similar looking, but only half the size bird here in North America, was just another version of the robin, but they were wrong. The North American bird called the robin, is actually a thrush.

Deer in one form or another are found around the world, as are moose, but the big North American animal Europeans called an “Elk” and most of us still call them that, is best referred to as “wapiti”, (Cervus canadensis), the word Elk is the European and Asian name for a moose. The wapiti is also found in eastern Asia but not in Europe.

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So when European’s spotted the little spring flowering plants growing on the Great Central North American plains, they just assumed they were crocus. The crocus is an African and southern European flower related to the lily and comes in 93 varieties. One of those looks remarkably like the little flowers that grows here. The spice “saffron” is extracted from the crocus and they are edible.

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But the little flower we call crocus is not even related to European variety. Unlike the crocus grown in gardens across the Atlantic, the North American plant grows from a seed that is carried by the wind and is nearly impossible to be cultivated in a garden, as it relies upon fungus in untiled soil to flourish. One other difference is that is poisonous. The Alberta Black Feet First Nations people used the plant in various medicines but it can not be taken internally. They are prairie anemone part of the anemone patens and are related to the buttercup family. They are also called the “pasque flower”, “prairie smoke” or “wind flower.”

Please don’t attempt to transplant some to your yard, it just won’t work and by digging up existing plants, you will be reducing the already disappearing population. Because of cultivation practices, the prairie anemone is getting harder and harder to find.

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