I was going back through my photos from today, and I found several that I took in an attempt to capture a clump of resurrection ferns growing on the branches of a pecan tree. The lighting didn’t cooperate, unfortunately. But after trimming one of the images, I found the result so intriguing that I decided to share it here.
For once, I have nothing more to add. I am positively tongue-tied.
After a string of cloudy days, skies cleared by mid-morning today. By the time I got outside late in the afternoon, it was cloudy again. The result, though, was this photograph, so I don’t mind.
Having provided readers with a couple of bright images, I have decided to include this one, too — an image so monochromatic that changing it to black and white makes no visible change at all. There is something peaceful, though, about gazing through the branches with half-focused eyes, admiring nature’s geometry….
With overcast skies and below-seasonal temperatures anticipated for several days yet, I am hungry for bright colors, which are all too scarce on my daily Piney Woods Church Road walks. Today I glimpsed a flash of brilliant red, when a cardinal alighted in a loblolly pine tree at the intersection with Hutcheson Ferry Road. Alas, my +10 macro lens was on at the time, and by the time I had unscrewed it and pointed the camera toward the pine branches, the bird was gone. Fortunately, though, water oak leaves this time of year are quite obliging (and far less ambulatory). I don’t think I could ever be sated by all the possibilities these leaves furnish for photographs evocative of stained glass windows.
On a raw gray day, with the temperature hovering in the mid-40s, I compelled myself to seek out more signs of spring’s eventual arrival. I spent perhaps fifteen minutes endeavoring to photograph a tiny bluet (Houstonia pusilla), a native wildflower so minute (a few millimeters across, on a stem a couple of centimeters high) that it is a challenge to capture even with a macro lens. The result, though, is worth the effort: a photograph with a vibrant splash of violet color, in the midst of a dark and drab late-winter afternoon.
The weather took a turn for the cold and damp today. Although the rain had ended hours before, the gray sky lingered into the middle afternoon. I set out down Piney Woods Church Road with hopes of new reflection photos, but a cold wind stirred what water there was (the largest drainage ditch was completely dry). It no longer felt like spring was near — there was a raw edge to the air that reminded me of winter, or possibly even late fall. So I took refuge instead in mementos of last autumn — a pair of acorn caps left behind on a branch after the acorns had dropped away.
The daffodils are still in bloom along Piney Woods Church Road, and more seem to be popping up every day. I find them intriguing, because even though they are so commonplace, they have an unusual feature, the corona, whose origin was not known to science until 2013. Just last year, researchers from the University of Oxford published a scientific paper in the Journal of Plant Science, indicating that the corona has evolved as a modification of the stamens of the flower.
It is mid-March, and ruderals, Spring’s harbingers, can be seen blooming along the roadsides. Ruderals are plants that inhabit “disturbed ground” such as garden beds, lawns, and roadsides. They live a hardscrabble life on the margin, surviving despite passing feet, lawnmowers, and even herbicides. The most common ruderal (nearly always in bloom) is the dandelion. But there are many others, far less conspicuous.
Just beyond the road’s edge can be seen tiny four-petaled bluish-purple blooms with bright yellow centers. In places a few flower heads that barely rise above the grass while elsewhere, clusters turn the verge almost blue. They are bluets (Houstonia caerulea), natives that are common across most of the United States. They have a vibrant color and delicate form, but no scent or folk use, except for bluet root tea, supposedly used by the Cherokee to treat bedwetting.
Nearby are slender stalks of hoary bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta). A Eurasian winter annual, this hardy immigrant goes by many names, including lamb’s cress, land cress, shotweed, and snapweed. It keeps its leaves close to the ground, sending up wiry stems topped by minute white flowers. How the “bitter” got into its name is not clear, unless it refers to gardeners’ attitudes about it. Although considered a “noxious weed” for taking over lawns and gardens, it is a tasty salad green, slightly peppery in flavor.
A short distance away lies a roadbank that was doused with herbicides late last summer. Already it is covered with new growth: slender green vines with small oval leaves, topped by white flowers. Each flower appears at first glance to have ten petals, but actually has only five, each cleft deeply in two. This Eurasian ruderal may be the world‘s most abundant weed. Sometimes called common chickweed (Stellaria media), it has many other names like starweed, starwort, winterweed, stichwort, and chickwhirtles. It blooms nearly year-round, pollinated by bees and moths. Chickens and small mammals eat the young leaves, while sparrows and finches devour the seeds. Like hairy bittercress, it can be added to salads, and can also be used to treat obesity.
Spring is coming, and the woodland paths will soon be edged with native wildflowers such as round-lobed hepatica (Hepatica americana) and bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis). But for now, while the forest rests in the quiet of late winter, the change of seasons can be found instead along Georgia’s roadsides, during this Ruderal Spring.
This article was originally published on March 18, 2010.
As spring slowly approaches, I am finding myself drawn to the ditch at the Hutcheson Ferry end of Piney Woods Church Road. Every visit, I am rewarded by the sighting of another new wildflower to photograph. There is a catch, though: none of the flowers is showy (henbit being perhaps the most dramatic of the bunch, with its flashy, orchid-like blooms), and all of them are minute, with flower heads a few millimeters across. These flowers belong to a group known as the ruderals: wildflowers of waste places (such as roadside ditches). They are nearly all non-natives. Hoary bittercress, for example, hails from Europe, and is common throughout the eastern United States. Of course, unless one is prone to kneeling on the lawn in late winter armed with a magnifying lens, the flower might an unfamiliar one. In this photograph, the blooms are surrounded by long, narrow seed pods, called siliques, which will ripen and then pop open upon being touched, sending a new crop of seeds on their journey. Later in the season, this annual will develop a basal rosette of pinnately lobed leaves; despite “bittercress” in the name, the leaves are edible raw or cooked.
