Stone Mountain, late August

 It’s been a while since I’ve caught up on walks through the woods. Here are the highlights:

• The muscadines are ripe. We saw the remains of black and dark purple grapes everywhere on the trail. The scientific name is Vitus rotundifolia. My father, as a boy in West Tennessee, would eat them until he got sick. I love muscadine jam and biscuits.

• All month, I’ve been watching common elephant’s-foot, Elephantopus tomentosus. It started blooming in late July and is still going, with lovely little purple flowers above dark green leaves that look like the colonial tri-cornered hats. It’s everywhere: deep woods, vacant lots, lawns.

• Bindweed, in genus Convolvulvus, is putting out striking blue flowers in the shape of a pentagon. The blue is the color you see in the French flag. There are perhaps 250 species in the bindweed family, which is cosmopolitan. Many people call the plants with pink flowers morning glories.

• American burnweed, Erechtites hieraciifolius, is heading. It’s a bit like a 7-foot dandelion. The flowerheads are in casings that remind me of pistol cartridges. The cylinders look perfectly round, as if they were machined. Burnweed is sometimes called fireweed. It’s among the first species to return after land has been burned.

• Carolina buckthorn, Frangula caroliniana, is putting out fruit, although  “drupes” is proper word; think of plums or olives, a fruit with a central seed. The drupes, which are the size of small marbles, were green in mid-August and are pink-red now. They’ll ripen to purple-black this fall. People eat them, and birds love them.

• Creeping cucumber, Melothria pendula, is a climbing vine with five-part yellow flowers, about an inch across. The fruits do look like a small cucumber, but they’re poisonous.