Flora
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.”
FLORA: Eulogy for Polk Place Persimmon
Flora has annually eulogized the university’s 200-plus-year-old “Polk Place Persimmon.”
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.”
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.
FLORA: Watch out for this one!
Well now, I had a wonderful, easy-to-grow, native wildflower groundcover all lined up for this week’s Flora when an awful, innocent-looking plant alien pushed it aside.
FLORA: Died and gone to heaven
It was the first weekend in April last year that I thought I’d died and gone to heaven when chancing upon carpets of the tiny little red-eyed, purple-petaled bluets carpeting the sacred ground of the Sparrow Cemetery out on Mt. Carmel Church Road.
FLORA: Tread gently among the trout lilies
More than four weeks ago Dave Otto spotted a trout lily in flower on Bolin Creek.
FLORA: What’s wrong with the red cedars?
This is the time in our changing seasons when we might become alarmed that some of our red cedar trees are diseased or otherwise sickly.
FLORA: Spring has sprung, and André Michaux is coming to town!
Three weeks ago local woods walker and photographer Dave Otto shared his image of trout lily, Erythronium umbilicatum, flowering down along Bolin Creek.
FLORA: Way over there in the watercress patch
Last week down in Saxapahaw during the 30th anniversary celebration of the Haw River Assembly, local musician and songwriter Tim Stambaugh excitedly said to me, “It’s watercress time again.”
FLORA: Being aware
National Invasive Species Awareness Week is Feb. 26-March 3!
FLORA: The flower that doesn’t stop
“Fields of dandelion are like huge cloud rafts floating on a sea of green. Lying back on this flowery bed can become intoxicating, the mind swooning with the fragrance…”
