Fall Wildflowers at Black Rock Mountain Lake

I love the fall with the golden rod and blue asters.


The picture below is Euonymous Americanus, also called "Hearts A-Bustin'"--I love seeing it in the fall. It's an American native plant and is found all over the east.

Bees and Asters

This weekend in N Georgia there were asters of many sizes and colors blooming everywhere. We stay in the mountains at my house across the valley from Black Rock Mountain so we often hike there.

At Black Rock Mountain State Park, there's a lake with a path to walk around it. We saw tons of these white asters, covered with honeybees and other bees as well. The first picture is a honeybee on the aster. The second picture is some other bee, also enjoying the aster.

I'm reading Sue Hubbell's A Book of Bees. She raised her bees in Arkansas, but says in her book that in the fall, the bees feed on asters as much as they feed on goldenrod. Either flower makes a rank-tasting honey, but mostly beekeepers leave this honey on the hive for the bees.

In the city of Atlanta we don't have much fall flow, but out in the country or up in the mountains, goldenrod and asters - blue ones and white ones like these are everywhere in abundance right now.

From reading the Internet today, I believe this is heath aster, or aster ericoides, found prolifically in Georgia. I'm not sure what these flowers are, but if you want to see a lovely collection of aster photos, click here.

Flowers, not bees!

I hiked a trail at Black Rock Mountain State Park
during my Folk School weekend and saw
foam flower (picture one),

Catesby's Trillium (picture two)













and joy, joy, joy, the pink ladies' slipper (picture three)