Celebrating National Wildflower Week - Blue Ridge Beauties

In the spirit of National Wildflower Week (May 4 - May 12, 2013), we've expanded our range a bit to encompass a previously unreported early May excursion to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. In between soccer games, we slipped up the Parkway to a couple of our favorite hiking trails where we ran into these cool wildflowers. 

Large flowered trillium, Trillium grandiflorum

Star Chickweed, or Great Chickweed, Stellaria pubera

The five individual petals are divided so that the five rays of the "star" appear to be ten.

More trillium, narrower petals, but still Trillium grandiflorum?

Painted trillium, Trillium undulatum

Rare pinkshell azalea, Rhodedendron vaseyi

Wild oats, Uvularia sessilifolia

More painted trillium

Golden ragwort, a spring-blooming aster

This crayfish is not a wildflower, but it was on the prowl in the crystal clear waters of the stream alongside which we found the trillium. Don't be fooled by the red exoskeleton, this critter's very much alive, and the water is about as far from boiling as you can get without icing over!

More pinkshell Azalea, a rare treat!

Cool leaves...

 

Dwarf Wild Iris

Wild Strawberries, with a single violet

Wild strawberry, up close...

Mystery...look it up and tell me!

Serviceberry (shadbush) in bloom, if you'd like some fruit, come back in June!

Sessileleaf Bellwort, Wild Oats

More wild strawberries (white flowers, 3 leaflets), growing alongside dwarf cinquefoil (yellow flowers, five leaflets), commonly mistaken for wild strawberries!

Apple tree, growing wild in a wooded mountain meadow.

More apple blossoms...

Wake Robin or Red trillium, Trillium erectus

Trillium erectus with spider, beware!

So ends our tribute to early May wildflowers (and big red crayfish) of the Blue Ridge Parkway in the Boone/Blowing Rock area.

Happy Wildflower Week!

In the Dead of Winter...Winter Green

As wintry as it gets in these parts. Highs in the twenties (F) with a steady freezing drizzle. Great time for a walk.

Skies are bleak, leafless limbs succumb to winter's icy grip. Gum ball hangs by a thread, clinging to her lofty perch, delaying the inevitable... 

Sleet and freezing rain pelt the forest edge. The ghosts of autumn shrink from Winter's frigid gaze.

Faces downcast, their pallid forms blur beneath the glaze.

Once lithe and graceful, brittle stems creak and bend; is this the end?

Silently, the tight pink bud gives answer, as last year's fruit gape into emptiness.

At her feet, sweet gums future wait patiently for the bitter cold to recede.

Bed of worms? Den of serpents? Unnatural relic. Not green.

Green! 

A single green leaf, in the dead of winter, by the brief light of day, conspires with the elements to bring forth summer's orchid. Crane-fly orchid.

Winter Green! Spotted wintergreen, or pipsissewa.

More winter green, Heartleaf or Wild Ginger.

Green with hint of red, smilax, greenbrier, catbrier, cat greenbrier...

Moving up from the forest floor, some of winter's most common greens... 

The forest gloom yields to the gleaming green leaves glistening beneath their still-hardening shells.

Blemishes diminish 'neath winter's spell 

As margins soften, shadows darken

Freckles, scars and veins vanish in the glaze

Flowing, slowing, ceasing...

Freezing.

And, everywhere, the pointy green leaves with red accents.

Hooray for holly wood. 

Winter green...