azalea – In the Woods

lasting for a very short time

A lovely walk with friends down by the creek, dotted with fleeting spring ephemerals at every turn. The trees are leafing out and the sky was as blue as it gets.

People have no respect for impermanence. We take no delight in it; in fact, we despair of it. We regard it as pain. We try to resist it by making things that will last — forever, we say — things that we don’t have to wash, things that we don’t have to iron. Somehow, in the process of trying to deny that things are always changing, we lose our sense of the sacredness of life. We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things.
~ Pema Chödrön
(When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times)

And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky —
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #466)

We are seeing, then, that our experience is altogether momentary. From one point of view, each moment is so elusive and so brief that we cannot even think about it before it has gone. From another point of view, this moment is always here, since we know no other moment than the present moment. It is always dying, always becoming past more rapidly than imagination can conceive. Yet at the same time it is always being born, always new, emerging just as rapidly from that complete unknown we call the future. Thinking about it almost makes you breathless.
~ Alan Watts
(The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety)

green-and-gold (thanks to Nina for the identification)

bluets, anchored in moss, clinging to the creek bank

The green-and-golds and the violet wood-sorrels were new wildflowers for me.

life as it is

I can see this year is going to have a lot of first-time-without-Tim occasions, but I’m starting to embrace them with a little more openness, letting the feelings be. The grief isn’t as raw these days, the waves of it feel more gentle somehow. And so I had a nice time visiting the Coker Arboretum with Sally while the college students were away on spring break.

spring starflower (South America)
with small milkweed bug

I did not notice that bug when I was taking the picture – it often amazes what the camera finds for me. We lingered quite a while near this beautiful patch of starflowers.

This bunch of spirea bushes was breathtaking – the camera tried but couldn’t quite capture the beauty. We also lingered here.

I don’t see nondual spirituality as a path to perpetual bliss. From my perspective, being awake is about total intimacy with life as it is. It’s not about escape or turning away. And it’s not about trying to find an explanation either, because ultimately, we can’t. Everything is the way it is because the whole universe is the way it is.
~ Joan Tollifson
(Right Now, Just As It Is!, August 21, 2025, “The Play of Life”)

Our lives teach us who we are.
~ Salman Rushdie
(In Good Faith)

Every once in a while the energy of a certain tree will attract me. This swamp chestnut oak was huge! There was something wise and majestic about it. I couldn’t get far enough away to get all of it, so I tried to get half of it. Conversely, because there are signs everywhere warning us to stay on the paths, I couldn’t get close enough to touch it, which is what I very much wanted to do.

But then I thought of my old gull friend with the mangled leg, and how I fed off his wise energy even though I never touched him. So I looked up into the branches and with the zoom lens saw some new leaves and catkins. It made me think of the quote about being intimate with life as it is.

Japanese flowering cherry tree (Kwanzan cultivar)

The last two pictures were actually taken on the UNC campus as we were walking back to the car. These special cherry trees were presented to the university by the Class of 1929, making them almost 100 years old!

So many beautiful blossoms on such a lovely warm spring day. And so many peaceful thoughts to bring home with me.

on certain mornings

3.11.25 ~ North Carolina Botanical Garden

Tuesday’s visit to the botanical garden was bright and sunny, and we enjoyed seeing the gentle, even light of the approaching equinox illuminating grasses, spring ephemerals, and shrub buds and blooms. Every year before spring arrives there are controlled burns in some of the piedmont and coastal plain gardens, and we happened to catch sight of one that day. We even spotted a squirrel along a path, so busy eating a bundle of plant stocks and leaves that he didn’t notice how close we were to him.

I can scroll and worry indoors, or I can step outside and remember how it feels to be part of something larger, something timeless, a world that reaches beyond me and includes me, too. The spring ephemerals have only the smallest window for blooming, and so they bloom when the sunlight reaches them. Once the forest becomes enveloped in green and the sunlight closes off again, they will wait for the light to come back.
~ Margaret Renkl
(The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year)

By Chivalries as tiny,
A Blossom, or a Book,
The seeds of smiles are planted —
Which blossom in the dark.
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #37)

The native wildflowers and grasses in these gardens beds evolved with periodic wildfires, which keep trees and shrubs from growing in and return nutrients to the soil. In a few weeks, new growth will be emerging from the ashes.
~ North Carolina Botanical Garden
(Facebook, March 10, 2025)

a yearly controlled burn in the Coastal Plain Habitat

So many simple ‘chivalries’ exist and noticing even a few of them can bring us great pleasure and help us to ‘remember how it feels to be a part of something larger.’

wild, free, spontaneous

6.8.24 ~ North Carolina Botanical Garden
eastern tiger swallowtail

These pictures are from another walk we took when we were still sick, the weather being so nice we pushed ourselves out the door. It was good to see even more things blooming.

We stopped for quite a while to listen to a Carolina wren loudly singing from a high branch just off the path.

And I’m also glad we went because, finally, the lemon drop swamp azalea was blooming! It was back in January I first spotted the little buds and kept thinking it would bloom soon. I checked on it each and every visit, wondering what color the blooms would be. A lovely shade of lemon chiffon, perhaps.

I do miss my wild beach roses but down here I’ve happily discovered wild Carolina roses, also known as pasture roses. They look about the same to me!

For myself I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous.
~ Edward Abbey
(Desert Solitaire)

The very tall (up to 8 feet!) giant coneflowers towered over me!

The height of a patch of native woodland sunflowers also caught my eye. Since I’m only 5 feet tall I guess I’m easily impressed.

And now, the weather is hot and humid, with no break in sight. But lots of flowers out there in the garden are surely thriving in it.

anticipation

4.19.24 ~ North Carolina Botanical Garden

The folks at the botanical garden are very excited because one of the American Columbos they planted 19 years ago is looking like it might flower this year! This flowering stalk (above), also known as yellow gentian, is about 2 feet tall and it could grow to between 3 and 8 feet tall.

After spending 19 years in our Mountain Habitat as an unassuming rosette of leaves near the ground, one of our American columbos is about to put out a spectacular flowering stalk for the first and only time. Then, after reproducing, it will die.
~ NC Botanical Garden Facebook page

a rosette of America columbo leaves on the ground ~
apparently this one not going to be flowering this year

We also enjoyed the presence of other plants and trees, already blooming…

A nice, quiet and cloudy late morning in the garden. We were a couple of hours later than usual and there seemed to be fewer birds out and about.

silent sunday

down in the sandhills

4.8.24 ~ Sandhills Horticultural Gardens
Pinehurst, North Carolina

By coincidence, exactly six years ago on this day, my sister-in-law and I visited this lovely horticultural garden near her home. (spring blossoms) We had a great time exploring it again. It was quite different than my local botanical garden. There were lots of huge, vividly colored rhododendrons, azaleas and camellias, and very few identification signs.

We found these in the Hackley Woodland Garden:

We walked the boardwalk in the Desmond Native Wetland Trail, a little nature conservancy and bird sanctuary. It was filled with birdsong and lots of new greenery. Looking up for birds I spotted the only thing blooming in there, a wild azalea. So delicate and pretty:

The Margaret H. Ambrose Japanese Garden was calm and peaceful. We paused a lot, reflecting…

And we finally took a quick peek at the formal Sir Walter Raleigh Garden:

It’s interesting how each garden had a very different mood to it. There were ten other gardens there we didn’t have time to see. I think a lot about the differences between preserved natural land conservancies and cultivated gardens. Each have their value and place in the world.

In the afternoon the four of us took Dan & Fran’s dog Biscuit for a walk in their neighborhood and enjoyed watching the solar eclipse with our special eclipse glasses. They seemed pretty flimsy but worked very well. I had also obtained a special filter for the camera lens. Tim had to hold it in front of the lens while I tried to find the sun without getting it in my eyes. When I fiddled with the zoom it would get fuzzy and we didn’t have a lot of time to figure out what worked best! It was very awkward but we managed to get a few shots.

I almost forgot to check the ground for crescent shadows…

at or near the 78% peak we got in our area

We went back to the house to enjoy a meal and then I took one last peek outside to see the last of the eclipse from the porch. The moon was near the top of the sun and some long leaf pine needles way up in the trees got into the picture, too.

Truly a day to remember!

hunting for cinnamon fern

4.2.24 ~ ‘old blush’ rose arbor
North Carolina Botanical Garden

It was spring vacation week so we had a chance to take Katherine with us on one of our walks at the botanical garden. Like her grandmother, she was enchanted by the rose arbor. And we finally saw tadpoles in the frog pond!

And of course we saw lots of flowers…

Katherine knows a lot about cinnamon ferns and she located some starting to come up in the Mountain Habitat (above). And then, in the Coastal Plain Habitat (below) she spotted some more that were taller and starting to unfurl. My granddaughter informed me that, among other things, cinnamon fern is the oldest species of fern on earth. (70 million years!)

learning about cinnamon ferns from Katherine
(photo by Tim)

Of course there were some birds to enjoy and a couple even paused for a photo or two…

Mr. & Mrs. Cardinal
he was feeding her but I couldn’t capture it!

What a blessing it was to share a beautiful day with our granddaughter, to share our interests with her and to have her share hers with us.

early spring in the arboretum

3.17.24 ~ pineland phlox
Coker Arboretum, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

This post is my contribution to Karma’s Signs of Spring Photo Hunt. I don’t have a prime lens, but the photos, except for the birds, were taken at about the same focal length with my zoom lens. (There was a lot of squatting involved to get the pictures.) Visit Karma’s post here if you’d like to participate.

It was spring break at UNC and we learned that we could easily find a parking space on campus when the students are out of town. And that meant we could finally visit the lovely Coker Arboretum, 5 wooded acres in the middle of a college campus. I came home with more than 300 photographs! What follows is a small sample of the birds and blooms we saw. Some of the plants were from other parts of the world.

I was especially attracted to the tiny South American spring starflowers which carpeted some of the garden plots. Something about those little purple lines on the petals. And the European spring snowflakes captivated me. They were a little bigger than our snowdrops. When I got home I learned they were native to southern Europe, all the way east to Ukraine, so I wondered if any of my ancestors had them in their gardens to welcome spring over there.