A garden on a boulder

 We stopped to rest by a boulder at Panola Mountain. It was about the size of a car and was covered with lichens and mosses. It seemed to me that nature had created a small Japanese garden on a bare chunk of granite in the Georgia Piedmont.

A better naturalist would have been able to identify every species. Most were primitive forms, but I saw two little trees growing out of crevices: a winged elm, Ulmus alata, and a sweetgum, Liquidambar styraciflua. 

The winged elm has seed in a papery case called a samara that is adapted to fly on the wind. The sweetgum puts its seeds in spiky balls that roll down the slopes until each finds a crevice. There is no level ground in the Piedmont, and sweetgum balls find every crevice. We have sweetgums growing out of joints in sidewalks.