Buckets of gold

 Rhus copallinum is blooming around Panola Mountain. The flowers are tiny but grow in panicles, which are stunning in the morning light. Imagine buckets of gold in a sumac bush and you’ve got the sense of it.

The common name “shining sumac” is apt now. In another month, I’ll call it by another common name, “flameleaf sumac.”

The gold panicles were spectacular, and the other flashy color in the woods now comes from American beautyberry, Callicarpa americana. The berries are ripening from green to purple — you see both colors in the same bunch this time of year.

The purple and gold are dazzling, but most of the blossoms in the forest at this time of year are white.

Late boneset is everywhere. The flowers are white and will remind you that they’re in the daisy family. We saw swarms of butterflies, including some big swallowtails, in the stands of Eupatorim serotinum.

The blooms that remind me of white sunflowers are frostweed, Verbesina virginica. It’s a plant that likes sun. I see it in clearings and at the edges of the forest.

The least impressive white blooms were on some little spurges, in genus Euphorbia. Twenty species live in Georgia, and I’m not a good enough botanist to distinguish them. I wish I were. The plant called Georgia spurge, E. georgiania, grows on granite outcrops, and Panola Mountain is a granite outcrop. I’d like to tell you I saw Georgia spurge. Perhaps I did.

The little flowers on the ankle-high plants were the least impressive of the many blooms. But they were the most intriguing. I spent hours trying to figure out exactly what I saw.