Posts under ‘Nature’

Flowering dogwood (cornus florida), as all Virginians should know, is the state tree. Early on, I noticed numerous dogwoods on my property – they are gorgeous in the spring when they bloom! On this trip, a friend told me that his grandfather had told him that if you find a lot of dogwoods on a [...]

Shortly after buying my property, I went out to Rocky Knob on the Blue Ridge Parkway and bought a copy of Trees & Shrubs of Virginia, by Gupton and Swope. While browsing through it, I noticed an entry for a “cucumber tree”. “Wow, that’s a funny name for a tree,” I thought. This trip, I [...]

Little by little, I am identifying the plants that are on my property. I took lots and lots of pictures, but when I got home and downloaded them, I found that I didn’t have a very good system for taking pictures. I often just took pictures of the leaves, instead of also taking pictures of [...]

Ah, wingstem! A vigorous plant, indeed. Early on, in the winter, a friend pointed the plant out and told me that it was locally called “stickweed”. He said that it hadn’t been all that common when he was a kid but that now it was everywhere. It is apparently called stickweed because kids play with [...]

When Fred First identified this plant as Virginia knotweed, I feared that it was related to the invasive exotic, Japanese knotweed. While both are in the same family (polygonaceae), Virginia knotweed is in the genus persicaria while Japanese knotweed is in the genus fallopia. Whew!! The plant is also known as Jumpseed, because the seeds [...]

Most of the trees on my property are really tall and I didn’t have binoculars with me to be able to see the leaves in detail. Some of the trees are very recognizable, like black cherry (prunus serotina), because of the distinctive bark and leaf. But others that I am not familiar with need to [...]

This post will complete the series of three that I promised in my post on West Indian Lilac. Hamelia Patens, also known as firebush, is a very attractive shrub with masses of orange-red flowers that are wonderful butterfly attractors. I see zebra longwings (heliconius charitonius) on the bushes all the time and occasionally I am [...]

When I first moved to my present place in 1999, I thought that I knew a lot about native plants. It turned out that I just knew some of the more common ones. I had never seen an inkwood (exothea paniculata), a krug’s holly (ilex krugiana), west indian cherry (prunus myrtifolia) or a coral bean [...]

I’m not sure why, but there are very few native plants in South Florida with showy flowers, unless you include the palm family. The many gorgeous flowering trees present in South Florida, like the yellow and pink Tabebuia, Royal Poinciana, various species of Frangipani, Shower of Gold and Jacaranda are all natives of other lands. [...]

I never gave the slightest thought, when I selected my vacation last fall, that this time of the year was Spring Break and Easter. That fact led to some re-scheduling and delays because folks were out of town, but I managed to get everything done that I wanted to accomplish. The weather was extremely hot [...]