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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American Beech leaves glistening gold everywhere. Photo by Ken Moore.

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 group of 11 adults and two lively youngsters would set off into the woods at the edge of Wilson Park at such a moment. But we did, and we were rewarded.

At the beginning of our adventure, I asked the two youngsters, Flora and Jasper, to serve as junior naturalists and lead us forward. Flora immediately initiated a game called “Find that Tree.” She beat us all to the base of the biggest of several sycamores and explained that she could find it because of the bark. We all admired the brilliant white upper trunks of the big trees brightening the dark gray day.
We left the big white trees behind down on the low ground as Flora ran ahead up hill into the piney woods to find leaves of different trees to show us. Young Jasper was proud to find a cone of one of the three different common pines, and that discovery was so important that it did not matter what pine it was.

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Photo 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. More »

Sycamore bark peels off to change the coarser grey-brown-green bark of the lower trunk to a smooth stark white trunk above. Photo by Peter White.

Botanical Garden director Peter White loves trees. Chatting with him over a coffee at Open Eye, I mentioned featuring the Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) in The Citizen’s “Flora” column. He enthusiastically responded with numerous stories.

Its beauty is somewhat obscured by the foliage during the growing season, but in the winter no tree in the Carolinas is like the sycamore with its distinctive bark and habit. The base is somewhat like a typical tree bark. Now, I’ll leave it to your imagination to visualize a “typical” bark. As your eye travels up the trunk of the tree, you will notice bark peeling off in large irregular scales colored from gray and tan to green. Further upwards, the trunk becomes very smooth and snow white in color, reaching skyward to the very branch tips. During the winter months, even viewed from speeding vehicles, the stark white stems along riverbanks are unmistakable. It occurs throughout our state – one of our most magnificent native trees.

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The brilliant red of Red-berried Swamp Smilax adorns bare tree branches in swampy sites. Photo by Ken Moore.

By Ken Moore

If you are expert at using your “owl eyes” while driving, you may spot some red berries that are neither holly nor dogwood. Like holiday lights, these red berries are strung up in tangles and thickets. I’m describing the fruit of one of the species of catbrier, Smilax sp., that folks curse when they encounter them in the wild.

Most of the Smilax species bear round clusters of black fruit. One of them, the Coral Greenbrier, or Red-berried Swamp Smilax, Smilax walteri, sports brilliant red berries. Unlike the Common Greenbrier, Smilax rotundifolia, and Catbrier, Smilax bona-nox, this red-berried Smilax is most commonly found in the standing waters of the bogs and swamps of the Sandhills and coastal plain. Rarely will you spot it in our eastern Piedmont.

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Rachel and Alex Beck hugging a big tree near the Adams Tract trailhead kiosk in Carrboro’s Wilson Park. Photo by Ken Moore.

By Ken Moore

Years ago, a tradition was begun by the Eno River Association: Volunteers led New Year’s Day walks along the river that flows through Hillsborough and north through Durham to Falls Lake. Enthusiastic walkers turned out for hikes on some very cold days, and in recent years hundreds of appreciative walkers show up to share the beauty of the river’s winter woods on the year’s first day.

Here in our own community, we are fortunate to have nice trails along low-lying greenway corridors and the Botanical Garden’s nature trails, Mason Farm Reserve and the Battle Park forest between Forest Theater and the Chapel Hill Community Center.

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Basal leaf rosettes of Cardinal Flower must have winter sunlight. Photo by Ken Moore.

By Ken Moore

Have you checked on your Cardinal Flower lately? You are likely thinking, “Hey, this is the holiday season and Cardinal Flower, Lobelia cardinalis, blooms in the late summer. This is the season for holly and mistletoe and hoping for snow.”

But think back to the late-summer brilliant red of Cardinal Flowers and the hummingbirds so attracted to them. If you are a gardener and you’ve been challenged in keeping Cardinal Flower through the winter, now is the time to give a little holiday attention to those plants.

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By Ken Moore

Last week I received a call: “Ken, where can I find a deciduous holly for my wife for Christmas?” This small native tree is not commonly found in nurseries, but this time I had a happy answer.
Having recently dropped by the Carrboro Southern States to pick up the bow of 25 yards of red ribbon being donated for the town’s giant holiday wreath, I was stopped in my footsteps by a group of deciduous hollies in full berry there in the garden center.

Though holly fruit are correctly termed drupes, most of us call them berries, and these berries absolutely sparkled. Some of the tags on the various little trees were labeled “Sparkleberry,” one of several cultivars of deciduous hollies. The true deciduous holly, Ilex decidua, a single- to multi-trunk small tree, is commonly called Possum Haw. Now, who is going to get really excited about that name? I would like to know the story behind that one. Common in woods throughout the Piedmont and coastal plain, this little tree is thoughtlessly destroyed when forests are cleared for new residential development. Unlike the more familiar evergreen spiny-leaved American Holly, Ilex opaca, deciduous hollies are not readily noticed where they are so plentiful in our local woods.

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By Ken Moore

For 20 years, the holiday greenery that has adorned the columns of Carrboro’s Town Hall has been the result of the time and creativity of members of the Carrboro Community Garden Club.

Now, this group of gardeners is not your typical garden club organization. It does not belong to a Garden Club Council. It does not collect dues. A hat is passed around if the group needs a few dollars. It does not have any official elected officers, though several individuals voluntarily perform essential functions to keep the group loosely organized. Members meet monthly at members’ homes, where they enjoy walking about one another’s gardens, discovering new plants and gardening ideas. All learn from members freely sharing growing wisdoms and experiences. These monthly gatherings have also become a rather serendipitous gourmet feast of members sharing food and treats. There are meeting agendas, but they are frequently altered on the spot to meet the immediate interests of the members. Typically everyone enjoys talking at once and, amazingly, some rather remarkable things get planned and executed.

The group has three ongoing projects in the Carrboro community.

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By Ken Moore

We’ve finally had some killing frosts and winter is beginning to settle in. This is the season we are accustomed to being the hosts of garden mums, Chrysanthemum x morifolium, with their neon-like orange, yellow and red colors, as well as the quieter colors of pink and white of Sasanqua Camellia, Camellia Sasanqua, cultivars. Also noticeable, more often smelled than seen, is the very fragrant, very tiny, flowered evergreen Sweet Olive, Osmanthus x Fortunei.

So it is often a surprise and a joyful relief to happen upon something different in flower this late in the season. For years, I have enjoyed the several specimens of Climbing Aster, Aster carolinianus,
(Ampelaster carolinianus) that have remained in full flower after killing frosts through the Thanksgiving holidays. This is one of our native asters; it occurs infrequently in our Southeastern coastal plain and more commonly further south down to Florida. It is somewhat surprising that it is such a hardy and sturdy grower in our Piedmont, a bit beyond its natural occurrence. It does not seem to pose a threat of spreading rampantly in gardens and in the wild because its characteristic late flowering doesn’t find many pollinating insects buzzing around to assist it in setting viable seed.

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Wreath of bay leaf branches woven into grape vine. Photo by Ken Moore

By Ken Moore

Back in the mid 1970s, UNC botany professor Dr. C. Ritchie Bell got an idea while teaching an Economic Botany class. In addition to teaching, Dr. Bell liked to cook, and he discovered that the leaves of a native plant were every bit as fine as those exotic bay leaves from California and the Mediterranean.

That plant, Carolina Red Bay or Swamp Bay, Persea borbonia, is an evergreen tree of the coastal plain from Virginia all the way to Louisiana.

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