FAVORITE WILDFLOWER WALKS IN GEORGIA
HUGH NOURSE AND CAROL NOURSE, THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS, 2007
Winter is a good time to plan some spring walks and to visualize the lovely wildflowers you can see in Georgia. A good place to start is with this book published by the University of Georgia Press.
This is a beautiful and well-organized book which categorizes the walks by the four main geographic sections of the state: the Cumberland Plateau, the Blue Ridge, the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain. Black Rock Mountain State Park’s Tennessee Rock Trail and a trail in the Warwoman Dell Picnic Area in the Chattahoochee National Forest are two of the walks described in the book for our Northeast Georgia area.
If you only read about the walks ins this book from your local portion of the state, you can limit your reading to the appropriate pages, but you will miss the lovely photographs and descriptions of many of the wildflowers described in the book.
Each walk contains a clear map, a set of directions to reach the site, and a detailed description of the walk which points out specific wildflowers you may see along the way. The months of the flowering season and the peak flowering time for each walk are also listed.
In reading this book, I learned about many wildflowers I had never seen before such as the Speckled Wood-Lilly and Catesby’s Trillium. As this trillium’s flower matures, it changes color from white to pink to rose. Naming this plant for Mr. Catesby was a fine way to honor the man.
Mark Catesby was an early eighteenth century English naturalist who traveled through the Southeastern states observing, drawing and collecting plants. He published A Natural History of Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and the Bahama Islands.
I hope you will read this book and in spring take the time to enjoy the wildflowers on one of these walks.
Holly Sparrow, Headwaters Master Gardener