Along Piney Woods Church Road, some tulip poplar saplings are continuing to burst their buds and fill out with leaves. I have never noticed the process before — how graceful the unfurling can be. I could fill my camera’s memory cards with photographs of buds and tiny leaves.
At last, I found a few tiny violets blooming along the side of the ditch where Piney Woods Church Road meets Hutcheson Ferry Road. In this photograph, a violet beams at me in the afternoon sunlight against a background of pure blue sky.
On my Piney Woods Church Road walk this morning, I found new growth everywhere I looked. These new leaves seem to glow from within with the vitality of springtime.
Over the past three months, I have taken several dozen photographs of the thick, wiry vines of greenbrier, festooned with massive thorns and draping themselves along several of the tree trunks along Piney Woods Church Road. Today, when I had no intention of trying to do so, I caught an image of them that I find striking. If a jazz riff could be photographed, perhaps it would look something like this.
I ventured out this afternoon into a brisk north wind, wearing my heavy winter jacket. Where had spring gone? The high wind made it considerably more difficult to photograph new growth on the shrubs and trees along Piney Woods Church Road, including this tulip poplar seedling. When the sun emerged from behind a cloud, though, the late-day lighting was marvelous. I fear for all these tender leaves, though, with temperatures expected to reach the mid-20s overnight.
This post is in honor of LBJs, or “Little Brown Jobs”, as birders refer to a range of fairly nondescript small brown species. I welcome a correct ID on this particular specimen, who was looking contemplative on a wire beside a fence along Piney Woods Church Road today.
This photograph is just what it claims to be, taken late this morning about a third of the way along my walk down Piney Woods Church Road.
Again, I set out to find new wildflowers, to no avail. The catkins on a couple of trees are nearly in bloom, but not yet. It is still the time of year when henbit and bluet hold sway. So I found some more red and brown leaves, instead. I sat down at the side of the road to photograph a couple of greenbrier leaves; midway through, I looked through the viewfinder toward the space just in front of me, and became entranced by long, thin blades of dry grass, making twirling forms in the breeze. Not exactly springlike, but still beautiful.
Tomorrow I will go in search of last autumn’s leaves. Maybe that way I will find a new flower in bloom along Piney Woods Church Road.
While hauling branches of a fallen cedar across my backyard, I discovered two splotches of bright purple standing out against the greens and browns of my still-mostly-dormant lawn. The first violets of the season are in bloom!
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!
