The forest canopy is dense, and it’s noticeably cooler when you get into the woods. Several plants are flowering in the forests around the stone outcrops. The color scheme includes yellow, white and purple flowers.
Among the yellows:
• St. Andrew’s cross, Hypericum hypericoide. It’s a shrub, usually belt high or shorter. The flowers have four yellow petals.
• Evening primroses and sundrops, genus Oenothera.
• Sensitive peas, genus Chameacrista. Some of the species have leaves are “sensitive” to touch — when you touch them, they move.
• Coreopsis, with serrated, rather than rounded, petals.
• Sneezeweeds, in genus Helenium. The flowers used to be dried and used as snuff.
I’ve already mentioned the goldenrods.
The white flowers I saw were flowering spurge, Euphorbia corollate and frostweed, Verbesina virginica.
Flowering spurge is small and low to the ground, but it was putting out tiny white flowers in bunches.
The frostweed, shoulder high, was in a stand at Arabia Mountain. The plants, loaded with white blooms, did look as if they were touched by frost, but that’s not the source of the common name. The plants have a tendency to split and ooze sap at first frost. The milky sap freezes and forms ribbons of ice.
Most of the purple blossoms are coming from pigeonwings, Clitoria mariana, and Maryland meadowbeauty, Rhexia mariana, which I’ve mentioned before. The earlier meadowbeauty flowers seemed whiter, with just a hint of purple. The blooms are purple now.
The pigeonwings are aptly named. The color reminds me of doves. We don’t have words that describe all the colors in the soft feathers of a dove’s breast.
Some naturalists see the shape of a mouse’s ear in the flowers of Clitoria mariana. It’s in the pea family, Fabaceae.
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