By Ken Moore Seven-year-old Flora Arnsberger accompanied her dad, Matthew, on a woods walk with me several months ago. Knowing that her dad often took her on nature walks, I suggested that Flora be my “junior naturalist†assistant. She delighted us by finding things that we older folks were simply too big and preoccupied to…
Category: Flora
Fiddleheads and wild azaleas
By Ken Moore A few days ago, local wildlife photographer Dave Otto sent me beautiful images of a Christmas fern (Polystichum acrostichoides) fiddlehead and a flower cluster of wild azalea (Rhododendron pericymenoides) expressing themselves along Bolin Creek in Carrboro. Those fiddleheads are a definite sign of spring. Once they begin unfurling their new leaves, we…
So many favorites
By Ken Moore The cool weather extension of the flowering of native trees and shrubs is resulting in a visual overload. The colorful images range from redbud flowers carpeting the ground, to the spectacle of whole roadside forest edges dripping with pale-violet hanging flower clusters of the deadly, non-native Chinese Wisteria, Wisteria sinensis.
Wild cherry drama
By Ken Moore Last Saturday, I saw a roadside spectacle as beautiful as any deliberately designed garden landscape. Nature’s inter-planting of yellow sassafras and pink redbud resulted in what may be best described as “roadside impressionism.†Fortunately, the recent cold spells have extended the flowering of these early bloomers. Now, amidst all this beauty, I…
In between redbud and dogwood there is sassafras
By Ken Moore As the pink-colored redbuds are now giving way to the pure-white dogwoods, your eye may catch some yellow tints produced by another native tree that flowers before the emergence of its leaves. Sassafras, Sassafras albidum, common throughout eastern North America, has a really special plant heritage. As Paul Green describes in Paul…
Follow the redbuds and dogwoods
By Ken Moore Native pink-flowered redbud, Cercis Canadensis, is right on schedule beginning its three-week-long flowering. It will be followed in a week or two by the pure-white Flowering Dogwood, Cornus florida. The combination of these two native trees’ spring awakenings gives us four to five weeks of flowering with a dramatic overlapping of the…
Making the emergence of spring
By Ken Moore You have to take care to avoid stepping on the Hepaticas when you approach the bench to sit and enjoy the sights and sounds along New Hope Creek at the old mill site. It’s springtime on Triangle Land Conservancy’s Johnston Mill Nature Preserve; Hepaticas and other spring wildflowers are emerging. Johnston Mill…
Don’t Miss the Spring Ephemerals
By Ken Moore Some of our most beautiful woodland flowers are called spring ephemerals because their visible presence is fleetingly brief. They emerge from the forest floor in the chilly late winter to take advantage of the full sunlight that’s absent once the forest canopy is in full leaf. By mid-April, some of these early…
Splendor in the grass
By Ken Moore I’m lucky to live where neighbors have not legislated against hanging laundry out to air dry. In addition to saving electricity and having sun-fresh clothes, I soak up some natural Vitamin D and have the opportunity to enjoy the late February blooming yard. Many of you have a blooming yard, but you…
Hazelnuts and wind
By Ken Moore Be on the lookout for a multi-stemmed shrub that appears to be decorated with pendulous, 4-to-6-inch strips of yellow yarn. If you examine these streamers closely, gently tap several of them. You’ll be surprised by the clouds of pollen. The streamers are staminate catkins, which are pendulous clusters of petalless male flowers…
Taking a closer look
By Ken Moore In February, I love observing the daily swelling of buds, the bright coloring of stems and the flowering of tiny winter annuals on the ground and shrubs and trees above. Simultaneously, this constant assault of springtime awakenings makes me panic with the realization that well-intentioned chores and worthy projects set aside for…
Signs of spring and birds’ nests
By Ken Moore The familiar signs of spring for most of us are already evident. Crocuses and Japanese Apricot, Prunus Mume, are in flower and daffodils are showing flower buds. But these are foreigners, long ago established in our cultivated gardens. True signs of spring are the deepening stem colors and swelling flower and leaf…
“Dead of winter†summer reflections
By Ken Moore It’s the dead of winter, and two summer-flowering vines have captured my interest. A Coral Honeysuckle, Lonicera sempervirens, caught my eye two weeks ago when it screamed across my deck for attention from beneath its cap of snow! Several clusters of scarlet tubular flowers continue to flower in spite of the subsequent…
Robert Frost moments in the Adams Tract
By Ken Moore A small group of us were rewarded with some beautiful and dramatic surprises during our woods walk on the Adams Track this past Saturday afternoon. It was very cold, the rain began to fall, and it was two hours before the Tar Heel basketball game. It’s hard to believe that a small…
Experience a winter walk in the woods
By Ken Moore I relish the winter woods; there is much to see, many subtleties of interest and beauty that are masked in the summer by dense foliage. The varied terrain of bare trees and the deafening silence of the winter woods are reasons enough to bundle up and become part of that scene.