Walking Piney Woods Church Road in a light rain, I find the roadside trees and shrubs bedecked with jewels. Ah, but water droplets are frustratingly difficult to photograph!
Mar 282014
Mar 242014
As I near the Hutcheson Ferry end of Piney Woods Church Road, I glance to my left and my eyes catch a lone oak leaf from last year. It waves at me, greeting me with shades of red, orange, and yellow-green.
Mar 242014
I’m on my way again, returning home down Piney Woods Church Road. I pause to appreciate the shadow of a pasture gate on the gravel roadway surface. Only later, going back through the images to select one for today, do I notice the cow grazing in the background. There are always more things to discover, all around us.
Mar 232014
I spent a marvelous couple of hours this afternoon looking for signs of spring with my dear friend Sarah Crutchfield at her forest haven, The Cabin Path, in unincorporated South Fulton County. And what adventures we had! In addition to finding abundant rue anemone and hepatica in bloom, we also discovered a number of bloodroot flowers, plus a Virginia pennywort and a red trillium whose bloom had not quite opened yet. We also saw quite a number of cinnamon fern fiddleheads, and a spider’s web that caught the afternoon sunlight beautifully. My harvest from the day’s outing is posted below: hepatica and bloodroot (first row); pennywort and trillium (second row); fiddleheads and spider’s web (third row).
Mar 232014
Almost everywhere I look along Piney Woods Church Road, buds are bursting open and new leaves emerging on the trees and shrubs. I feel so ignorant, because most of them I cannot actually identify yet, until the leaves unfurl completely and flowers bloom. And maybe not even then…
Mar 222014
Yesterday afternoon, I went on a short hike at the Boundary Waters Park in Douglasville, Georgia, about twenty minutes northeast, by car, from my home. The red trail there leads up and down hills (quite steeply in places), through a mature deciduous forest. On my walk, I was delighted to discover several early spring wildflowers: violets in abundance along the floodplains of streams, and rue anemone, cutleaf toothwort, and hepatica blooming on the forested slopes. I also saw a wild turkey dash across the path in front of me, but he (or she) was far too quick for my camera. Pictured below are a violet and rue anemone (top row) and cutleaf toothwort and hepatica (bottom row). What lovely discoveries on a mild early spring day!
Mar 202014
On this first day of spring, I set out down Piney Woods Church Road in search of an appropriately evocative subject for a portrait. I was hoping for another spring wildflower — purple violets are blooming today in my backyard, and I was expecting I might find one on my stroll. The only flower in bloom along the roadside that I have not documented in this blog is a tiny yellow blossom with a green center that belongs to a weed that prefers wet places and stalwartly resists being brought into focus in my lens, despite several days, wet shoes, and muddy cuffs.
What caught my eye, instead, was a minute red leaf, the size of my pinky fingernail (and I have small hands). It was one leaf of only a few, on a roadside plant I could not identify (mostly because there was so little of it present in the first place). The plant appeared to have been mowed, or cropped by a horse or a deer. The leaf was such a brilliant red color that I felt called upon to photograph it.
There is something delightfully symmetrical about this picture, evoking autumn on the first day of spring. I am reminded of the Chinese yin-yang symbol, in which both dark and light contain within themselves a circle of the other. In this same way, my spring walk contained, as well, a reminder of the autumn to come.
But for now, bring on the wildflowers!
Mar 192014
There is such grace and beauty in the curving form of a single blade of onion grass growing along the roadside. To think that we consider it a common weed, and spray it with chemicals to remove it from our lawns….
Being unable to decide whether I prefer the image in color or black-and-white, I am posting both forms below; I welcome reader comments.
Mar 182014
What can be more Georgia than this: loblolly pines reflected in water tinted red with Georgia red clay?
Mar 172014
Along Piney Woods Church Road, a ditch filled with water after two days of rain reflects trees, barbed wire fencing, and sky. There is so much to stop and notice on the edges of our vision, out of the corners of our eyes…
