Leaves alone

It’s hard enough to identify flowers… but this time of year, you see some pretty interesting leaves, too. I’m pretty sure this one is a cinquefoil… I can identify a few, the most obvious ones like rattlesnake plantain. But others, well, I am just not that good yet. Ok – it’s a really small fern? [...]

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First blood(root)

I saw the leaves first. Bloodroot leaves have a distinct scalloped edge and palmate shape, so they are easy to spot even when small. But the further down the trail I got, the more flowers I saw…. Great clusters of the toadshade trillium that I anticipated last visit: Some of it was quite tall already [...]

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Magic hour

It was 75 degrees today, and the walk to the post office in the village seemed like the perfect way to get exercise AND photos. Almost everything looks better in the “magic hour” just before sunset. Beech trees, though, are particularly glorious. In Nature Valley, they hover around Disharoon Creek. Beech trees love the moist, [...]

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drive-by sightings

PS to previous entry: Even from a speeding car, beech trees are easily identified. And are pretty enough to stop and take a photo.

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Unmistakable

Today is the best day of the year to identify an American beech. Here in North Georgia, the day is so gray that it’s dark out at high noon. The kind of thick day we used to get in Seattle – when you think that the sun itself is science fiction, and that nothing in [...]

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Still unsolved

The mystery of why beech trees retain their leaves dangled over me this week. But Jim found this at a blog by freelance writer Caroline Brown, called “Earth Friendly Gardening“: Marcescence is when a plant part dies but is not shed. It’s most frequently noticed in the winter, when certain deciduous tree species don’t lose [...]

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Not an oak, part 2

Now I have to make the case to my mentor-botanist, Jim Smith, who had suggested a red buckeye. When I wrote to him about my trail walk, I said: I didn’t see any red buckeyes, but I fell in love with a huge American Beech at the river’s edge. I’m thinking that this species will [...]

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Finding the tree

When I first moved to North Georgia, in 2007, I turned away from my lifelong dedication to words. I gave all my energy to photography. I devoted myself to seeing, rather than saying. In those first six months, the smallest things captivated me. I spent hours in the dirt photographing mushrooms. I took a hundred [...]

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