Saturday, September 20, 2025

A walk before the equinox

 The woods at Panola Mountain are purple with beautyberries and yellow with crownbeard.

American beautyberry, Callicarpa americana, always produces berries. This has got to be a bumper crop.

Yellow crownbeard, Verbesina occidentalis, looks like ragged sunflowers. 

We also saw some Agalinis tenuifolia, which people allegedly call slender false foxglove. I’ve never heard that name. The little lavender flowers were growing around an outcrop. They seemed to be coming out of the granite.

Porter’s sunflower, Helianthus porteri, also seems to grow out of the rock. It loves the thin — almost nonexistent — soil around the outcrops.

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