The Carrboro Farmers’ Market annual Tomato Day this Saturday is a great teaching moment.
Category: Flora
FLORA: Water’s edge botany
After months and months, I finally got the kayak out on the water a couple weeks ago.
FLORA: Searching for the Carolina lily
Dr. W. C. Coker began the Coker Arboretum as an outdoor classroom to supplement classes on identification and ecology of North Carolina native plants.
FLORA: ‘Lived to learn it!’
“Lived to learn it†was A.J. Bullard’s response when I queried him last week about his accumulated mulberry knowledge.
FLORA: Great Aunt Myra Baldwin’s pressed flower
Six weeks ago I was all set to tell a story about sundrops, Oenothera fruticosa, my identification for Jock Lauterer’s great aunt’s pressed four-petaled, yellow, early-May wildflower in “A Thousand Words.â€
FLORA: Mulberry names go round and round
Citizen reader Mary Ayers recently suggested that I might enjoy seeing a beautiful red-fruited mulberry tree out on Union Grove Road at the edge of a farm field.
FLORA: Discover a new trail on National Trails Day
This Saturday is the American Hiking Society’s 20th National Trails Day.
FLORA: Little blue flowers steal the show
Two blue-flowered beauties have taken center stage during my recent walkabouts.
FLORA: Our spectacular Piedmont
This week I was planning a Flora story inspired by the pressed-flower specimen in Jock Lauterer’s Great Aunt Myra Baldwin’s 1943 diary described in a recent “A Thousand Words.â€
FLORA: Eulogy for Polk Place Persimmon
Flora has annually eulogized the university’s 200-plus-year-old “Polk Place Persimmon.â€
FLORA: Spectacular wildflowers in the Piedmont
A friend visiting from the Carolina mountains inquired of some local folks about locations of spectacular wildflower displays here in the Piedmont.
FLORA: ‘Curiously lurking amongst the grassy leaves’
Legendary English gardener and writer Vita Sackville-West described spiderwort as “… a plant I like very much, sometimes called the Trinity Flower, owing to its three petals of a rich violet, curiously lurking amongst the grassy leaves.â€
FLORA: It’s all there
With three parted leaves like the traditional shamrock, the wood-sorrels are calling out to us these days from sunny and shady locations.
FLORA: Wild geraniums
Cool, moist interludes during this early warm spring provide optimal conditions for a lingering presence of our wildflowers.
FLORA: Lowly, lovely cinquefoil
It is so interesting to watch the unfolding of the new landscape slowly emerging around the N.C. Botanical Garden’s new building complex.