The mock strawberry (Duchesnea indica) beguiles Piney Woods Church Road passers-by with its brilliant red, luscious-looking fruits. Alas, it is all appearance; supposedly it has no flavor at all. It is not even related to the true strawberry; its resemblance is the result of convergent evolution, not genetic similarity. But oh how lovely it is, evoking the harvests of a summer soon to come.
Today was my first day “in the field” with my new Olympus OMD EM5 camera. I still look fondly upon the Sony CyberShot that I used for the first 127 days. But this new camera leaves me amazed with the vividness of color and crispness of images possible. I am still figuring it out — there is so much to learn! Today, I share this image of a leaf miner’s “scrawl” on a leaf of muscadine grape, reminding me of scrimshaw work.
On my way home down Piney Woods Church Road, I glimpsed this spider web along a barbed wire fence. The spider evidently used a dried plant stem as a frame, crafting its web within that spiral.
A massive old tulip poplar, partially dead and bearing a lightning scar, is currently blooming in a cattle pasture along Piney Woods Church Road. I confess that I had never before seen the tulip poplar blossoms on the tree — only later, as scattered petals fallen onto the grass. The creamy yellow-white and brilliant orange flowers are lovely to behold.
Time for another celebration of a common weed, which one of my flower guides deigns to call “troublesome in lawns”. For a couple of weeks now, I have enjoyed the English Plantain (Plantago lanceolata) lining much of Piney Woods Church Road. I particularly relish the architecture of the leaves, with their parallel ribs. The flowers themselves are (even by my open-minded standards) rather nondescript — absolutely minute white blooms crowded together on a cylindrical head, with only a few flowers blooming at any one time. Besides the deep blue of the sky (several days without rain now, and several more lie ahead) and the gray of the roadbed (recently regraded and regraveled), most everything I see — apart from the occasional cow — is some shade of green. A solution, at least for today, is to convert the Plantain image into black and white instead.
On the 124th day of my year-long journey, a leaf of an air potato vine (Discorya sp.) is backlit by the morning sun filtering through the trees along Piney Woods Church Road.
The leaves of a sourwood sapling glow in the late-afternoon sunlight along Piney Woods Church Road.
With today’s project, I reach a third of the way through a year along Piney Woods Church Road. I continue to feel immense gratitude that there is so much that is wondrous yet to discover on my journey. Lately, I have become entranced with the play of light. Late this afternoon, I set out with my wife and our four small dogs on a walk there, my expectations tempered by a mostly cloudy sky. As we walked, though, the sunlight emerged and lit the woods and pastures ablaze with yellow-gold. In this photo, the leaves of this greenbrier are glowing brightly, as if caught up in a dance of light.
Near sunset, I took this photograph of a spider’s web constructed on a barbed-wire fence along Piney Woods Church Road. The web is filled with particles of pollen that glow in the golden late-day light.
After overnight rain, I set out down Piney Woods Church Road, noticing how the flow of water was already changing the newly-graded road surface, forming shallow channels where the water flowed, and excavating new potholes (or exhuming old ones?). One particular tulip poplar leaf caught my attention. On its underside were perched several minute water droplets, like temporary worlds. I saw a tiny black form swimming in one of the droplets; I suspect that a microscope would reveal many more.
