Month: June 2022

My garden is designed to create a welcoming habitat for a variety of wildlife, so I was pleased this week to have an amphibian visitor, this pickerel frog. My love of frogs goes back to early childhood. My father, aunt and I would make an annual pilgrimage to the swamps of upstate New York in… Continue reading Pretty But Poisonous

Black cohosh is flowering now in my forest, apparently enjoying the string of 90-degree days and high humidity as summer approaches. It has an assortment of colorful names. My favorite is fairy candle, because when the last light hits them in the forest they seem lit up like fanciful candles. My first memory of this… Continue reading Fairy Candle

The first time I remember seeing wandflower was at Duke Gardens. I was visiting there with my aunt and uncle, who retired to Durham while I was living nearby. I would go on walks and hikes with them every weekend for the four years we overlapped, except in summer when they escaped the North Carolina… Continue reading Wandflower

The meadows at the tops of some higher peaks in the southern Appalachians, locally known as balds, have spawned many theories. Possibly no one explanation fits them all, ranging from lightning fires to soil conditions. One of the more intriguing ideas is cold weather during the Ice Age prevented trees from growing on some summits,… Continue reading Gregory Bald Azaleas