Seasonal Highlights
Learn More
Other Websites
Spring Highlights
Plants & Landscape
Image gallery loading....
72157643326200303
Animals
Image gallery loading....
72157643344928685
- 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
Image gallery loading....
72157643326895483
Animals
Image gallery loading....
72157643345008275
- 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
Image gallery loading....
72157643327473374
Animals
Image gallery loading....
72157643346350123
- 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
Image gallery loading....
72157643327606223
Animals
Image gallery loading....
72157643346460263
- 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