Spring Highlights

• New emerging leaves and fern fiddleheads
• Blooming spring ephemerals such as Solomon’s plume
• Blooming shrubs and trees: flowering dogwood, sassafras, mapleleaf viburnum, blueberry bushes
• Maroon blossoms of pawpaw, each about 1 ½” wide

Summer Highlights

• Full green of summer leaves
• Blueberries
• Blooming wild hydrangea

Autumn Highlights

• Colors of the changing leaves
• Fall blooming flowers: white wood-aster, white snakeroot, tall rattlesnake-root, other aster family plants
• Food for animals: mapleleaf viburnum and flowering dogwood berries, acorns, hickory nuts, beechnuts, pawpaw fruits (people eat pawpaws too!)
• Chipmunks, cheeks bulging, on their way to stockpile their own burrow with a winter’s hoard of nuts and seeds
• Don’t miss: the yellow, fringe-like flowers of the American witch-hazel in late autumn and early winter

Winter Highlights

• Evergreen leaves of Christmas fern and marginal woodfern
• Interesting shapes and textures of twigs, bark, and buds: smooth gray American beech trunks, vertically striped bark of northern red oak, blocky bark of blackgum and flowering dogwood
• Gray squirrels hurrying around the forest floor to retrieve one of their thousands of stashed acorns