Seasonal Highlights

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Rock Creek Park

Spring Highlights

Plants & Landscape

Animals

  • Yellow blooms of yellow trout-lily, Indian cucumber, northern spicebush, and tuliptree
  • Pink or lavender to white blooms of eastern redbud, liverleaf, Virginia springbeauty, and violets
  • White blooms of mayapple, bloodroot, smooth Solomon’s seal, Solomon’s plume, flowering dogwood, blackhaw, southern arrow-wood, cutleaf toothwort, star chickweed, and hairy sweet-cicely
  • Maroon blooms of pawpaw
  • Greenish to purple hoods of Jack-in-the-pulpit
  • Fresh pale green leaves emerging after winter—tuliptree leaves among the earliest
  • Migratory and year-round resident birds nest-building; some young beginning to hatch by mid to late spring
  • Pollinators on early spring flowers such as pawpaw

Summer Highlights

Plants & Landscape

Animals

  • Lush greenery on the forest floor
  • Multiple kinds of ferns fully unfurled
  • Yellow blooms of richweed
  • Orange blooms of orange jewelweed
  • Tiny white blooms of broadleaf enchanter’s-nightshade
  • Lime green fruit of mayapple and pawpaw
  • Red berries of Solomon’s plume
  • Dark berries of Indian cucumber
  • Butterflies, moths and other insect pollinators
  • Hungry baby birds calling to parents; busy, busy parents finding food; fledglings learning to fly
  • Redback salamanders rustling under damp leaves

Autumn Highlights

Plants & Landscape

Animals

  • Green ferns persist until frost
  • Yellow leaves of tuliptree, northern spicebush, American hornbeam, and American beech—by far the most obvious fall color
  • Red leaves of flowering dogwood
  • White blooms of white wood-aster
  • Orange blooms of orange jewelweed
  • Red berries of Jack-in-the-pulpit, Solomon’s plume, northern spicebush, flowering dogwood, American strawberry-bush, (and the invasive non-native linden arrow-wood shrub)
  • Dark berries of southern arrow-wood and blackhaw
  • Green pawpaw fruits with brown spots as they ripen
  • Squirrels eating beechnuts and American hornbeam nutlets
  • Birds harvesting berries
  • Toads preparing to burrow deep in the soil for winter

Winter Highlights

Plants & Landscape

Animals

  • Interesting shapes and textures: majestic straight trunks of tuliptree; smooth, gray bark and “rippled muscle” trunks of American hornbeam
  • White streaks ("ski-trails") on trunks of northern red oak
  • Fat onion-shaped flower buds of flowering dogwood
  • White-tailed deer browsing on bare twigs of trees and shrubs
  • Winter birds