As I near the Hutcheson Ferry end of Piney Woods Church Road, I glance to my left and my eyes catch a lone oak leaf from last year. It waves at me, greeting me with shades of red, orange, and yellow-green.
Mar 242014
Mar 232014
I spent a marvelous couple of hours this afternoon looking for signs of spring with my dear friend Sarah Crutchfield at her forest haven, The Cabin Path, in unincorporated South Fulton County. And what adventures we had! In addition to finding abundant rue anemone and hepatica in bloom, we also discovered a number of bloodroot flowers, plus a Virginia pennywort and a red trillium whose bloom had not quite opened yet. We also saw quite a number of cinnamon fern fiddleheads, and a spider’s web that caught the afternoon sunlight beautifully. My harvest from the day’s outing is posted below: hepatica and bloodroot (first row); pennywort and trillium (second row); fiddleheads and spider’s web (third row).
Mar 222014
Along Piney Woods Church Road, the earliest to bloom of the red maples have begun producing seeds. These nascent maple keys have not yet developed their final shape, but are merely tiny, oval forms suspended where the flowers used to be.
Mar 222014
Yesterday afternoon, I went on a short hike at the Boundary Waters Park in Douglasville, Georgia, about twenty minutes northeast, by car, from my home. The red trail there leads up and down hills (quite steeply in places), through a mature deciduous forest. On my walk, I was delighted to discover several early spring wildflowers: violets in abundance along the floodplains of streams, and rue anemone, cutleaf toothwort, and hepatica blooming on the forested slopes. I also saw a wild turkey dash across the path in front of me, but he (or she) was far too quick for my camera. Pictured below are a violet and rue anemone (top row) and cutleaf toothwort and hepatica (bottom row). What lovely discoveries on a mild early spring day!
Mar 202014
While hauling branches of a fallen cedar across my backyard, I discovered two splotches of bright purple standing out against the greens and browns of my still-mostly-dormant lawn. The first violets of the season are in bloom!
Mar 182014
What can be more Georgia than this: loblolly pines reflected in water tinted red with Georgia red clay?
Mar 122014
I have more signs of spring to share, after another outing to a nearby public garden yesterday. Left to right and top to bottom: magnolia, windflower, trout lilies, cherry blossom, crocus, daffodils.
Mar 112014
Thank you, Karen Reed, for your excellent suggestion of a title for today’s photograph of a greenbrier leaf. I feel drawn to photographing the fascinating internal structures of leaves, and this is one of the most stunning examples I have yet encountered.
Mar 102014
Wandering down Piney Woods Church Road late this afternoon, I passed a driveway all aglow with moss sporophytes, with their globe-like capsules perched atop stalks, called seta, reaching high above the leafy gametophytes. (That sentence, I realize, begs a lesson in the moss life cycle, but I will instead refer curious readers here.) The yellow-green of this sporophyte carpet betokens the impending arrival of spring (although not before another cold spell visits the region this Wednesday).
Mar 092014
While the resurrection ferns along Piney Woods Church Road are still green, I took the opportunity to take a few more photographs of them. Here is a trio of new images.
