Category Archives: Flora of Lavender Mountain

Walking through summer

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As both of my long-time readers know, I take my dogs for a walk down Fouche Gap Road almost every day. As I walked along the road one day in September, while it was still summer, I felt transported to my summertime youth. This was a typical walk down a typical country road on a typical summer day. Listen to the cicadas; this is the sound of summer as I remember it. These are annual cicadas rather than the more famous periodic cicadas.

For some reason I have not been able to insert the video the way I normally do, so I have to insert a link here. Click on the link, then, when you are finished, hit the “back” button on your browser.

http://www.caniconfidimus.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/summer.mp4

Not that many days later I took the dogs for another walk, and this time the sounds were different.

http://www.caniconfidimus.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/fall.mp4

If you listen carefully, you can hear acorns falling out of the trees. You may also hear a pileated woodpecker in the background. Of course every time I started recording, it seemed like the acorns stopped falling, and when I stopped recording, they started falling again. Shy oak trees, I guess.

We have lots of oaks on the mountain, and this year was a particularly good one for acorns, a mast year. They accumulated almost in drifts at the side of the road.

Zoe likes acorns, but she can’t figure out what to do with them once she picks them up.

Some photos

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I haven’t posted for a while, so I have a backlog of photos. Here are a few of them.

There was a nice shower over town a week ago (or so) that produced an almost complete rainbow.

Later, some clouds got in the action.

Some of the flowers in the flower bed beside our house were in bloom. The irises are impressive, but they don’t last too long. This is looking towards the thick tangle of trees across the driveway. The crape myrtles are just starting to bloom.

Looking back towards the house.

Here are some closer shots.

More recently we have had an invasion of Japanese beetles. This is the first year they have been a problem, at least above ground. I looked at our crape myrtles a few days ago and saw a few of them. I couldn’t reach the tops of the plants where the beetles like to do their business, so I sprayed some pesticide. It scared away a lot of beetles, but probably didn’t do any good. Yesterday I noticed them on the yellow flowers you can see in the foreground of the third photo above. I think the flowers are irises.

My preferred method of control is to get a container of hot, soapy water and drown them. They have a defense mechanism that makes that approach work reasonably well. When the beetles are disturbed, most of the time they simply drop from their perch. I place the container immediately beneath them, so they drop into the water. The detergent reduces the surface tension, so they sink and drown. Here is my first harvest.

I didn’t count them, but I estimate more than 50 and probably less than 100.

On Sunday I found more. I got around 30 this time. I hope their numbers continue to decline. They are seriously destructive. The crape myrtle blooms that were visible in the first shot of the flowers are no longer visible; they have been eaten, along with a lot of the upper foliage. They have also eaten away a lot of the irises, and some of their foliage.

I surprised a lot of them in the throes of passion. That was particularly satisfying because of what the offspring do.

I was not aware that their larvae damage grass roots and can cause visible damage to the grass above ground. I have noticed a few places where my grass is not doing well. I don’t know whether Japanese beetles are responsible, but I spent enough time, money and effort on our front yard that I don’t intend to let the little bastards damage the grass. Traps for the adult beetles apparently cause more harm than good because they attract far more beetles than they trap. Biological warfare against the larvae seems to be an effective course of action, although it can take years to work well. I will probably get some of the bacteria that are used (a bacterium called Paenibacillus popilliae.) Then I will poison them.

Spring in Georgia

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Spring weather may be variable in Georgia, but one thing is going to be pretty consistent — pollen.

I walked around in the front yard on Tuesday. Later in the evening, when I was sitting with my feet on a pillow on our coffee table, I noticed some yellow smudges on the pillow. It was pollen off my socks. This is what my shoes looked like. I brushed the pollen off my left shoe for comparison.

The pollen count here was 3336 particles per cubic meter, high, but nowhere near as high as the record. Atlanta’s highest recorded pollen count was 9369 particles on March 12, 2021.

They say that tree pollen is the highest contributor now. That’s mainly pine and oak. Around here, it’s mainly pine that produces the billowing clouds of fine, yellow particles that coat everything. I have to rinse my truck windshield with a hose every time I go anywhere. We park our car in the garage, so it stays relatively clean, but an hour outside leaves a fine layer of yellow particles over the entire car.

It’s really quite annoying. A locally well-known gardening expert recommends avoiding painting outside from mid-March to early April. It’s early April right now, and I wouldn’t paint anything outside that I didn’t want yellow.

Most of the pine pollen should be gone by May. I hope.

Fall shots

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It’s fall here. The trees are just starting to turn, but last week, something other than a tree rushed to show its color.

This is a Virginia creeper. It’s a common vine on the mountain. In fact, it’s a common vine in about half of North America. Its range covers the entire eastern seaboard, as far west as Colorado, as far south as Texas (at least), and all the eastern Canadian provinces.

One of the most notable features of the Virginia creeper is that it is among the first plants to show fall color. I was driving down Fouche Gap Road last week and saw this brilliant red streak running up the side of a tree. When I took the dogs for a walk down that way, I took this photo. The red had faded by the time I took it, and the vine was bare about a week later.

Another vine is also showing some color.

Poison ivy. Not all that pretty. I have seen some poison ivy turning red as well.

The maples and sweetgums are beginning to turn, but the oaks haven’t really started yet.

Another sign of fall is dead deer dumped on the side of the road. I noticed a plastic garbage bag lying beside the road a couple of weeks ago. I thought it had fallen from the back of a pickup truck on its way to the county garbage transfer station; that happens sometimes. But when I nudged it with my shoe, I realized it was too heavy for garbage. I figured it was almost certainly something dead. I did not investigate further because I didn’t really want to know. I hope it’s only a deer.

The plastic protected whatever it was for longer than I expected, but by Wednesday, the sharp senses of the vultures had led them to it. They had torn the bag open, and the smell was not pleasant.

Zoe went crazy when she saw the vultures. In her opinion, they were not supposed to be there. The birds flew up into the trees. They are hard to see in this shot.

Here is a closer view of the birds.

They waited till we passed, then returned to their business. I was hoping they would find whatever is in the bag, because that’s the only way it was going to be cleaned up.

Mushrooms

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For the first time since we moved in here, we have large mushrooms growing in the front yard. They struggled to form a fairy ring, but couldn’t quite manage it.

They’re really big.

I don’t know if a toad could use it for a stool, but it might be handy as a parasol.

Georgia has a lot of mushrooms. A few are edible. Most are inedible. Some are poisonous. I would never pick a mushroom in the wild to eat. I just don’t know enough about them, and they aren’t really my favorite food anyway. Based on my limited research, these do not look like the edible mushrooms of Georgia.

I posted a photo of a turtle eating a mushroom. It looked somewhat like these, but I wouldn’t make a bet on it. I also wouldn’t eat a mushroom just because a turtle said it was safe.