On the trail to Tribble Mill

 Near the ruins of Tribble Mill is an impressive stand of Joe Pye weed, genus Eutrochium.

The Greek means something like “good wheels.” The long, skinny leaves are whorled. Five or six leaves radiate from the same point on the stalk, like spokes on a wheel. The plants I saw were more than 7 feet tall. The stalks and stems have some purple in them, like rhubarb. The leaves at the bottom were more than a foot long. The length of the leaves in the whorls gets shorter toward the top, so the shape of a Joe Pye weed might remind you of a Christmas tree.

They were just putting out whisps of purple flowers.

Among the blooms of July: dayflowers, Commelina communis, beautiful but invasive; tickseed, in genus Coreopsis; white beggarticks, Bidens alba; wild petunia, Ruellia caroliniensis; and bear’s foot, Smallanthus uvedalia.

The Georgia Piedmont is full of old mills. Tribble Mill, now part of a park in neighboring Gwinnett County, was built in the 1830s at a falls. It’s more of a water slide than a falls, I’d say, though the current was strong enough to move a 100-pound dog who loves water.

• Note: I’d like to know more about Joe Pye. The Adirondack Almanack says he was Joseph Shauquethqueat, a Native American herbalist who lived in the late 1700s and early 1800s in Massachusetts and New York. The almanack’s article is here:

https://www.adirondackalmanack.com/2020/06/whats-in-a-name-joe-pye-weed.html#:~:text=For%20years%2C%20it%20was%20unknown,(2017).