An ant exploring a female holly flower. Note the immature berry at the flower center. Photo by Ken Moore.

Holly flowers are really neat. Though not big and showy like dogwoods and magnolias, once you have looked closely at a cluster of holly flowers you may get hooked on looking forward to them each spring. And you’ll feel really special when you can determine for your neighbors and friends whether or not a particular holly will have berries in the fall.

Knowing that holly trees are either male or female, you can describe that a winter berry display on a female tree depends upon the presence of a male holly within flying distance for insects to carry pollen from the male to the female tree.
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Autumn olive is an ‘Ill-natured Agnes’. Photo by Ken Moore.

The Haw River Assembly’s Earth Day walk along the Haw River revealed a spectacular display of an ill-natured plant.

No sooner had we entered the forest on the northeast side of the US 64 bridge than several walkers inquired about the heavy, perfumed fragrance wafting on the spring breeze. We eventually became accustomed to that scent, which accompanied us for half of our leisurely mile-long excursion along the river. Some portions of the path were almost tunnel-like passageways through thorny thickets of this exotic shrub bearing countless clusters of tiny, white, four-petal flowers in the axils of silvery leaves.

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Flora in her climbing tree. Photo by Evelyn Greene.

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 notice.

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Fiddlehead of Christmas fern is protected by a hairy jacket. Photo by Dave Otto.

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 can usually be confident that the warm growing season has finally arrived and we can move forward with our vegetable and flower gardening pursuits – but hold it right there!! Remember last year, when we had a serious frost about this time that resulted in some real setbacks for tender garden plants as well as our native flora.

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A redbud floral garden carpet. Photo by Ken Moore.

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.

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Young wild cherry leaves have subtle beauty. Photo by Ken Moore.

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 noticed another of nature’s seasonal designs. Less welcome to most folks are the webbed nests of tent caterpillars that appear in wild cherries, Prunus serotina, and cultivated apples, cherries and plums. Some homeowners cause tree injury in the practice of burning the nests. If there is an urge to battle this particular cycle of nature, a twist with a cloth-tipped stick will harmlessly extract the nests.

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Three types of leaves characterise the sassafras tree. Photo by Betsy Green Moyer.

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 Green’s Plant Book, “It was especially fancied in late Elizabethan England because of Sir Walter Raleigh’s colonists on Roanoke Island sending back sassafras bark and roots to be used medicinally.”

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Redbud’s many shades of pink. Photo 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 two.

In recent years, this extended beautiful beginning of our natural Piedmont spring has been overshadowed by the short, week-long blinding white explosion of the exotic Bradford Pear, Pyrus calleryana ‘Bradford’, over-planted along city streets and in parking lots and residential landscapes.

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Harbinger of spring: flowers of Hepatica. Photo by Ken Moore.

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 Nature Preserve is just one of several that Triangle Land Conservancy (TLC) manages throughout Chatham, Durham, Johnston, Lee, Orange and Wake counties. It is well worth your investigating the website, www.tlc-nc.org, for site descriptions and a schedule of seasonal interpretive walking and canoe excursions in these preserves.

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You have only a couple of weeks to catch the fleeting Trout Lily. Photo by Dave Otto

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 risers will have flowered, made fruit, dispersed seed and returned to dormancy. The Trout Lily is a classic spring ephemeral. I failed to interrupt my busy indoor pace a few years ago and I missed the pageantry of this little woodland lily. That had a dramatic impact on me. I no longer take lightly the passing of seasons. The budding, flowering, leafing, fruiting and return to dormancy of plants are cherished as special separate annual occurrences.
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Tiny speedwells blooming now in local yards. Photo 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 may move over it too quickly to enjoy the diversity of flowers scattered there. But if you have one of those deliberate lawns of turf grass — severely maintained with fertilizers, herbicides and copious amounts of water — you will not have a blooming yard.

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Pendulous male catkins of American Hazelnut. Photo by Ken Moore.

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 providing pollen for the much-less-obvious petalless female flowers.

The challenge of this botany lesson is to find the female flowers. You’ll have to look closely to find tiny swollen buds with clusters of rosy red threads protruding from the bud tips. These short red threads are the stigmas of the hidden female flowers. The exposed stigmas catch the passing pollen that is required for those flowers to produce hazelnuts.

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Red flowers of female Red Maple. Photo by Ken Moore.

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 the winter months are far from completed.

My moods of panic result in negative outbursts like “I hate spring!” and “spring is highly over-rated!” My annual vocal springtime pronouncements are by now expected by friends. My gardening friend, Sally, always thoughtfully reminds me that the word “hate” should be eliminated from one’s vocabulary and she offers sincere condolences that I find anything but joy with the re-awakenings of spring.

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Sturdily built nest of a clever bird architect. Photo by Ken Moore.

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 buds in the wilds of nature’s garden. This past weekend, four of us enjoyed discovering some of these spring signals along Bolin Creek trails in the university’s Carolina North Preserve (Horace Williams Tract).

Following are descriptions of some early-spring signals. But first I must digress to share what we saw while crossing a field. We spied a really beautiful tiny lichen-encrusted bird nest situated about ten feet above us on a lateral limb of a small Hackberry tree, Celtis laevigata. We thought the architect to be a hummingbird. The nest appeared so sturdy we could imagine it being used a second season. We’ll return in late spring to investigate. What a clever bird to site the nest in this particular Hackberry: the trunk and lower limbs are abnormal with numerous thorny, twisted twig growths emerging from the characteristic warty bark. It presents a very unappealing climb for predators.

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Coral Honeysuckle flowering in mid-winter. Photo by Ken Moore.

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 below-freezing temperatures. It’s the nature of this native vine to flower off and on throughout the summer into mid-December. Flowering now in midwinter is unusual. But, hey, that’s nature!

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