A cloudy day can make anyone blue, but who would have guessed that it could also make a flower frown?

Let me introduce you to the wood anemone, a truly fair-weathered flower. A wood anemone prefers a sunny day and will lift up its small white flower toward the sun. However, when clouds come, this flower will close up and droop toward the ground.

With so little rain lately, this little woodland wonder has had a good run of sun, but you likely won’t be able to find it in your favorite forest anymore. It is gone as quickly as it appeared, seeming to disappear without a trace.

Wood anemone is a spring ephemeral. This describes a flower that blooms before the trees leaf out, and quickly disappears when the leaves spread open and shade the ground below.

If you were out and about in the woods last week, you may have noticed it covering the ground in colonies — a mass of single white flowers, each on a hairy stalk accompanied by compound leaves in groups of three. Its flower has five petal-like parts, called tepals, which gives rise to its scientific name, Anemone quinquefolia (five-leafed). Its creeping rootstock allows for the rapid spread of this plant, though it can sometimes take up to five years for the initial flowering.

Those fast-fading flowers perhaps explain the name. Anemone is believed to arise from a Greek word meaning ‘wind,’ and their quick bloom was thought to be as ‘fleeting as the wind.’ Thus they were also called windflower. Other names are a bit more intriguing, and of curious derivation, including smell boxes, nightcaps, snowboys, little Buffalo medicine and thimbleweed.

Classical mythology had a sorrowful tale of the origin of these ephemerals. It was said that the goddess Venus wept for her beloved Adonis, and “Where streams his blood there blushing springs a rose / And where a tear has dropped, a wind-flower blows.”

In keeping with the sad story, this plant maintained an acrimonious reputation. One source explains, “Though so innocent in appearance, the Wood Anemone possesses all the acrid nature of its tribe and is bitter to the tongue and poisonous. Cattle have been poisoned, Linnaeus tells us, by eating it in the fresh state after having been underfed and kept on dry food during the winter, so that they were ready to browse on the first leaves they saw. A vinegar made from the leaves retains all the more acrid properties of the plant, and is put in France to many domestic purpose.”

Even more solemn is that anemones have been used in Chinese funeral rites and are associated with death. On the flip side, in another time in another part of the world, Romans picked the first flower that appeared and tied it around one’s neck to prevent fever and illness. 

Fading from both forests and memory, wood anemone and other spring ephemerals have disappeared as quickly as they burst forth. So, memory must serve us until next spring — perhaps aided by William Cullen Bryant’s poetic tribute:

Within the woods,
Whose young and half transparent leaves scarce cast
A shade, gray circles of anemones
Danced on their stalks.

Suzan Bellincampi is director of the Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary in Edgartown, and author of Martha’s Vineyard: A Field Guide to Island Nature.