For Wildflower Wednesday hosted by gail over at clay and limestone, I am going back to Chapel Hill in April.
For a long time I was on the fence about Fothergilla. I found the bottlebrush flowers to be a little strange and the honey scent I read about seemed weak to me. Then I saw them in full bloom and even more importantly saw them in their fall finery (here and here).
At the NC Botanical Garden
and on the UNC campus.
A young beech tree in Battle Park.
It's nice to see a beech tree on campus whose smooth gray bark is not blemished by carving. In the Botanical Garden woods it seems almost every tree has initials carved in it. The new leaves are exactly the color of Crayola spring green.
A blackhaw viburnum in Battle Woods. There's a big beautiful blackhaw by the Totten Center in the Botanical Garden that inspired me to buy one, which is now a little stick planted in the ditch at the back of the big bed. This year I had it in a spot that was obviously too dry for it because it didn't budge in height at all.
Little Sweet Betsy (Trillium cuneatum) and fernleaf scorpionweed at the Coker Arboretum. I read in one of Elizabeth Lawrence's books that a wide swath of T. cuneatum is wonderfully sweetly fragrant. I can confirm that so is a single one when I had one in my garden.
'The Rising Sun' Eastern redbud with golden ragwort. Normally I don't care for plants with yellow foliage but this one is stunning in dappled sunlight.
With yellow trillium and fothergilla
The fairy-like flowers of a parsley hawthorn at the Coker Arboretum.
