Sunday, April 19, 2015

Spring Walk At Fort Yargo State Park: Shelter A To The Old Fort, 10th April, 2015 (Part 1)

April 10th. I started to walk again at Fort Yargo State Park in Winder, Georgia. 
One of my favorite walks is from the Group Shelter A to the Old Fort and back. This is a rewarding walk for viewing wildflowers and I’ve been trying to walk it weekly.

  

The route, which I described here, here, and here. Things, in the way of Spring wildflowers, were starting to warm up on my most recent walk, documented here and here.


We’d had a lot of cloudy, rainy weather - the forecast indicated it would start raining at about 1:00 pm - so I was trying to get this walk in before the rain started. The light level was low so photographing presented a challenge and I had to use more artificial light than I like but… I found a few ‘new’ flowers on this walk. 



A couple of Dwarf Cinquefoil (Potentilla simplex) were blooming, as was 

  

this plant that I think is a hawthorne (Craetagus sp.) 



Black Cherry (Prunus serotina) trees were blooming. 

  

The Black Walnut (Juglans nigra) had leafed out nicely. 



The buds on Deerberry (Vaccinium stamineum) bushes were just starting to open.



Most of the Strawberry (Euonymus americanus) bushes still had triplet flower buds although many had lost one of the buds. 

  

Many Eastern Sweetshrubs (Calycanthus floridus) buds had opened. The opened flowers were brown compared with the deep maroon of the buds. The opened flowers blended with the green leaves and were harder to see.

  

The shoreline was becoming increasingly green compared with a few weeks previously. 



As I approached the cliff, I noticed some small trees with white flowers that I think I had only seen once before in either Oglethorpe or Wilkes counties. These were Carolina Silverbell (Halesia carolina); the trees ranged from about 5 to 15 feet high. Luckily many of the flowers were at waist to eye level and easy to photograph. In a few years, these may be beyond reach and will have to be enjoyed at a distance. 



The Mountain Azaleas (Rhododendron canescens) – at least that’s my identification based in the fact that the tubes were slightly sticky to the touch – at the top of the cliff were in various stages of blooming.



When I looked over the edge of the cliff, I could see a Mountain Azalea and Trumpet Honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) flowers. 



The Mountain Azalea was putting on quite a show. 



The Trumpet Honeysuckle flowers were just starting to open, while… 



those at the top of the cliff were developing nicely. 

To be continued… 


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