Everything outdoors is filled in and green now! I came home with hundreds of pictures Sunday afternoon and struggled to narrow my selections down to 36, so I’m splitting them down to sharing a dozen a day for three days.
We were delighted to find a pair of house finches enjoying a late lunch at the feeders.
And then there were plenty of flowers, of course!
crossvine
wild columbine (aka eastern red columbine)
wildflowers in the sassafras sapling grove
sandhills bluestar
eastern bluestar
I noticed this well-defined fern shadow on the boardwalk (above) and then found the beam of sunlight on a Christmas fern (below) that was creating it.
The cinnamon ferns (below) have grown so tall since I photographed their fiddleheads on March 26th!
Blooming wild azaleas scattered around the botanical garden looked so pretty there, accenting all that new greenery.
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)
dimpled trout lily
little sweet Betsy
‘lemon drop’ swamp azalea
‘Georgia blue’ speedwell
Lenten rose
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)
weeping forsythia
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.’
2.2.25 ~ Bolin Forest, Groundhog Day (no shadows at first)
On Groundhog Day last year we took our groundhogs, Basil & Oregano, to the botanical garden to check on their shadows, so this year we decided to take them out into the woods. Our friend Susan joined us for a nice long walk down by our neighborhood’s Bolin Creek.
The weather was chilly, cloudy, damp and gray. It had been raining recently so there was plenty of mud along the path, making for some dicey footing. Susan spotted a red-shouldered hawk who visited a couple of trees before settling on one where I could get a picture.
Only the beech trees and their marcescent leaves, looking like sand or wheat, bring light to such dark, wet woods, standing out vividly among the dark-gray oak and hickory trunks and the cyanine green of the cedars. A few of our beech trees are large and well spread out, but many more are saplings, six to twelve feet high, present and proud and serving as fine, multifaceted reflectors. ~ Bland Simpson (Clover Garden: A Carolinian’s Piedmont Memoir)
A funny thing happened after a couple of joggers passed by us. Apparently it took them some time to realize what their eyes had just seen. (A grown man carrying two stuffed groundhogs.) They stopped running, looked back around and one called out to us, “Wait a minute! Is it Groundhog Day?” We all had a good laugh.
Tim, Oregano & Basil bird-watching together
Bolin Creek was gurgling away, pleasantly full of water and sounding so very soothing.
The sky was so gray, but then, as we started heading back home, the sun made an effort to break through, lighting up the beech leaves…
“fine, multifaceted reflectors”
… and making the creek’s water sparkle in a few spots. So we had Oregano & Basil pose for a second Groundhog Day photo.
(shadows!)
Looking at pictures of our groundhogs’ shadows back in Connecticut I happened to notice that they were a lot longer than the ones down here.
2.2.19 ~ Eastern Point Beach Groton, Connecticut
AI Overview tells me that “shadows are generally longer in the winter, especially in locations further north, because during winter the Northern Hemisphere is tilted away from the sun, causing the sun to appear lower in the sky and cast longer shadows; the further north you go, the more pronounced this effect will be.” I find this so fascinating!
7.18.22 ~ Groton, Connecticut great blue heron feeding
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. ~ Wendell Berry (The Peace of Wild Things)
Stop and listen to the ragged-edged beech leaves, pale specters of the winter forest. They are chattering ghosts, clattering amid the bare branches of the other hardwoods. Wan light pours through their evanescence and burnishes them to gleaming. Deep in the gray, sleeping forest, whole beech trees flare up into whispering creatures made of trembling gold. ~ Margaret Renkl (The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year)
12.20.24 ~ North Carolina Botanical Garden
A week ago I made a quick trip to the botanical garden to take a final picture for my four seasons photo hunt, and added it the post, which had become an eight season collection. It was a chilly, gray day but I was tempted to linger and see what other kinds of pictures could be taken in the very dim light of midwinter. One beech tree was full of marcescent leaves. A single leaf was dangling from another one.
white-throated sparrow
Finally, I got pictures of one of the white-throated sparrows foraging under the bird feeders, where there is a little less brush for them to hide under. There is stark beauty to be found in the winter garden, when seedheads are left naturally for the birds to eat.
a squirrel nest
oakleaf hydrangea
oakleaf hydrangea
Happy New Year!
a lingering aster
eastern gray squirrel
pansies
It still amazes me how pansies are winter flowers down south here! Imagine – pansies outside in December! Even though the temperature was in the low 50s that day, it felt cold and raw to me, in spite of my extra sweater, winter jacket, hat and gloves. I could have used my thermal underware but I didn’t think it would feel that cold out there.
One of the many things I do miss about being a young person is what was my tolerance for the cold. I used to love winter, being a January baby, and have many more fond childhood memories of playing outside in that season than in the others. (No bugs!) My sister and I spent countless hours ice skating in the frozen swamp in the woods behind our house. It was fun gliding across the (sometimes lumpy) icy hollows between the hummocks. A challenging obstacle course. And not a pansy in sight until April!
“Woodland Stream in a Winter Landscape” by John Henry Twachtman
I cannot tell you how the light comes. What I know is that it is more ancient than imagining. That it travels across an astounding expanse to reach us. That it loves searching out what is hidden what is lost what is forgotten or in peril or in pain. That it has a fondness for the body for finding its way toward flesh for tracing the edges of form for shining forth through the eye, the hand, the heart. I cannot tell you how the light comes, but that it does. That it will. That it works its way into the deepest dark that enfolds you, though it may seem long ages in coming or arrive in a shape you did not foresee. And so may we this day turn ourselves toward it. May we lift our faces to let it find us. May we bend our bodies to follow the arc it makes. May we open and open more and open still to the blessed light that comes. ~ Jan Richardson (How the Light Comes)
“Self-portrait. Between The Clock & The Bed” by Edvard Munch
The Clock strikes One That just struck Two — Some Schism in the Sum — A Sorcerer from Genesis Has wrecked the Pendulum — ~ Emily Dickinson (The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #1598)
Down in a green and crowded box A modest pansy grew Its stalk was bent it hung its head As if to hide from view. And yet, it was a lovely flower Its colors bright and fair, It might have graced a rosy bower Instead of hiding there.
Yet there it was, content to bloom Its modest tints arrayed, And there it spread its sweet perfume Within the silent shade. Then let me to the window go This pretty flower to see That I may also learn to grow In sweet humility.
~ Author Unknown
I found this poem back in August, written or copied by hand, on a slip of paper hidden between other papers in one of the family history boxes I was diligently sorting through. I don’t know if one of our ancestors wrote it or if they copied it down from some other source. Naturally, I thought it would make for a great post when pansy season came around.
Well, I was still pondering how different the seasons are down south here, after experiencing apple picking for Lammas Day instead of on the Autumn Equinox. I was in for another big surprise. It turns out pansies are considered cool season annuals in North Carolina, and they bloom from fall through spring! They are usually planted from late October through the month of November!
Then I remembered noticing last fall that the local nursery was selling pansies right alongside mums. Another memory surfaced, too, seeing pansies in flower boxes along the sidewalks back in January 2019, when we were down here visiting. It seemed like they were out so early, but they had probably been there since November.
These discoveries are leading to a paradigm shift in how the wheel of the year looks to me. So I decided to be a careful observer for a year or two, letting my old assumptions go and gradually finding a new way of thinking about (and celebrating!) the seasons.
Pansies for All Souls’ Day? In honor of an ancestor who loved and wrote down this poem? Why not? “Learning to grow in sweet humility…’
The inspiration of nature can help us deal with death and endings, gifting us with the courage to let go and the strength to carry on. The pain and uncertainty may be no easier to bear but the release of autumn asks that we trust in the process, bravely facing the growing darkness without ever knowing if the light will reappear. ~ Maria Ede-Weaving (The Essential Book of Druidry: Connect with the Spirit of Nature)
