Trout Lily (Adder’s Tongue, Dogtooth Violet): Emmons’ Preserve, Kennebunkport, Maine, USA, May 2026 — My first trip to Emmons’ to look for Trout Lily a month ago, there were no leaves even showing. Yesterday I found them well scattered through all the likely spots, but not in bunches as I have seen them the past few years. I looked it up. Only 1% of Trout Lily plants flower each year. Those are the mature plants with two leaves. It takes between 4 and 7 years for a plant to mature, and maturation depends on the amount of sunlight the plant receives between the leaves emerging and the canopy closing over them. They tend to grow in patches where the spring canopy is thinnest and because they spread through a shared network of roots underground. On the plus side, if you view all the Trout Lily plants in a forest as a single organism, the trout lily in reactively undisturbed forests might be 1000s of years old. This is apparently a year when only a few plants have reached maturity, and when the already mature plants apparently did not store enough energy to produce a bloom this year, so flowers are few and far between. And many are very small (perhaps first-year blooms). It took me a long time to find a very few of what I would call full-blown Trout Lilies. These two were half the size of some of the others I found, and the ones I have come to expect. Sony a6700. Sigma 16-300 Contemporary at 105mm equivalent field of view. Aperture program with macro modifications: f22 for depth yielded 1/30th @ ISO 100. Working at ground level off my tiny tabletop carbon fiber tripod. (One of my best purchases ever!) The main limiting factor was the wind.