The first water lily (Nymphaea odorata) blooms of spring, together with cypress, Spanish moss, and mistletoe.
Pictures by Gretchen, 20 March 2008.
You never know what you’ll find swimming about, such as this pair of
Canada geese on March 27 2008.
Gretchen didn’t have a telephoto lens, and the geese weren’t going to let us paddle any closer,
so she took this picture through one side of her binoculars.
What are those yellow vine flowers that smell like jasmine? Yellow jessamine (Gelsemium sempervirens), native to the U.S. southeast (and the South Carolina state flower, although these examples grow in Lowndes County, Georgia).
But don’t eat them; they contain a compound similar to strychnine and said to be as effective as hemlock. Nonetheless, sometimes used as a sedative.
Pictures by Gretchen.
They look like burnt sticks, but they like fire:
burnt longleaf, pictures by Gretchen, taken in Berrien County, Georgia, 26 March 2008.
The pictures of
Easter Lilies from a few days ago obviously aren’t the big Japanese
lilies commonly sold as Easter Lilies; they’re a native plant,
found in their native habitat in Lowndes County, Georgia.
Everybody around here recognizes them, and seems to call them either Easter Lilies, or “those lilies you see in the ditch by the road.” Nobody seems to know any other name for them, neither common nor botanic.
So Gretchen and I journeyed two hours south to the strange land of Gainesville, Florida, to attend the Gopher Tortoise Council spring meeting, taking a few samples of “those lilies” in hopes that the assembled botanists and biologists could identify them. And they could! Continue reading
Native dogwoods
(Cornus florida) blooming in the woods, Lowndes County, Georgia. They’re everywhere, but they only show up on camera if they’re close by. Pictures by Gretchen.
Native wild azaleas,
Rhododendron canescens, growing in the woods.
No, not honeysuckle; that’s a vine, and is from Japan. These are bushes, and are from here.
The canopy road leading to the entrance of Old Dorchester State Park, South Carolina:
A previous landowner clearcut what was natural forest and replanted slash pine. Apparently nobody told
these longleaf not to sprout up from seed.
