A walk in the woods



I know she named this one, but in my concentration to get
 a picture and not fall off the rock at the same time, it
totally escaped me. I now know it is a Canadian Columbine.

 It's one thing to stroll through the woods by yourself. It is quite another to do it with Holly Scoggins, Associate Professor, Department of Horticulture, and Director of the Hahn Horticulture Garden at Virginia Tech.  First she scouts a location for the walk a couple days ahead of time and remembers the location of assorted lovely flowers and plants.  Then she leads a group of early risers through the morning chill and damp and points out treasures like May apples (flashback to my childhood, carefree days in forests), Jack in the Pulpits (familiar, but rarely seen by me), walking ferns (obviously more gifted at walking in the forest) and horsetail reeds, a bundle of which I once had in my possession.  Of note is that she doesn't just say "horsetail reed," she says "Equisetaceae," or things like "Aristolochiaceae" and she somehow wraps her tongue around them before 9 a.m.

In addition to the many interesting flowers and plants Holly pointed us to, she also led us to the Falls Ridge Waterfall which squirmed its way over the rocks, left and right and left again for a total of 80 feet, delivering the always satisfying sound of water in motion and the vision of sunlight dancing on the ripples.  It was not a bad way to start the day.

Walking stick photo published

I'm a regular!  My second photo has been published in the New River Valley Current and they printed it BIG.  It was the walking stick photo from a couple of blogs ago.  I bought myself a new camera this week so I'll have to try it out in hopes of getting more pics published.

Walking stick visitor

Some visitors come to talk, some to eat, some just come to Preston Forest  to hang around, as was the case this week with a large and strange bug perched by Bill's workshop door.  "Get your camera!  You gotta see this thing!" said Bill.  A good carpenter always measures so he came to the photo shoot with tape in hand to show just how big this dude was.  For 10 minutes we closely examined him from inches away and he never so much as twitched.  His quarter-inch, squid-looking face was armed with antennae about three inches long; his jointed legs bent at strong angles. A search of walking sticks on the web revealed his Borneo cousins can grow to 13 inches long so ours proved to be a lightweight in the world of phasmida. Most fascinating detail--females don't need the males to reproduce so totally female colonies are sometimes found.  As we were checking him out so closely it would have been nice to know he (she?) is capable of shooting poison that causes blindness in his enemies!