Wildflowers…

Wildflowers make wonderful subjects, especially during the early spring.  This weekend took me back to South Mountain State Park here in Western North Carolina.  I will probably be doing a lot of visiting at this particular park this year, as I have often ignored it in the past and really I shouldn’t have.  During my visit this past weekend, the 25th, of April 2009, I had the pleasure of talking with the resident Park Ranger.  Though her last name eludes me at present, I am thinking that her first name was Cheryl.  Anyway, she was kind enough to show me some of the plant life around the park and introduce me to a few that I had not noticed there in my past visits.  Cheryl was a very knowledgeable birder also, being able to identify and tell me about the birds that we were hearing all around us.  Anyway, I was given an invitation to speak at the parks Visitor Center Amphitheater and Museum, on the various things that I have been photographing here in North Carolina.  I told my host that I would think it over and at present it sounds like a great idea, though it has been years since I have done any public speaking.

Anyway as I said my goodbyes and thank you’s, I wandered off down one of the many trails that the park has, most of them of course up hill but wonderful to hike just the same.  As I walked along I came up one a multitude of “Foam Flowers.”  I always have enjoyed these tiny spikes of color during my spring walks and can never resist the chance the photograph them, though I already have a multitude of Foam Flower photos.

Unfortunately, these little flowers are short lived or ephemeral but as you can see, one spike contains many flowers.  They often grow at low altitudes here in the mountains of North Carolina but can be found sometimes above 5,000 feet.

Another one of my favorite flowers of spring are the Dwarf Iris’s.  I have a few that have come up in the woods behind my apartment but it must take a few years of growth before they will bloom.  However at South Mountain, most everywhere one looked or so it seemed, there were these lovely blue, yellow, and white iris’s.

Are these not the loveliest of flowers, they were everywhere!  I know little about flowers but for some reason they remind me of an orchid, though they are far from it.  I took these from a distance to show how they tend to grow in dense groups but if one gets close, say with a 60mm macro lens, there is really a lot of lovely details in the petals of these flowers, as you can see in the photograph below.

I took a multitude of photographs while at South Mountain and had the opportunity to talk with the ranger once more before I left.  All in all, I had taken over forty some odd photographs during my visit, though most were of the same subjects but at various angles and distances, with and without flash, so I could sit an ponder over what I might would like to keep and what not.  Still afterwards, I came away with quite a number of “keepers,” something that rarely occurs.

I have plenty of more images to show from South Mountain and as the weather continues to warm, maybe I will be able to photograph a rattlesnake or two, since South Mountain is known to have them.  The ranger was telling me that most people who visit the mountain seldom see the “rattlers,” though they walk right past them!  I will most certainly, be very sure to keep an eye out for them during future visits.  Though snakes do not worry me as long as I know where they are at, it is the large spiders that live in these mountains that I fear the most.