ferns — 2012 — The 21st Century Matriarch

Gambrill State Park is in the Catocin Mountains near Frederick, Maryland and is a pleasant morning trip from where we live. Morning is the key this time of year - before the heat of the day gets too over powering. We were there by about 9 on Memorial Day and it was pleasant but humid...then warm and humid by the time we finished our short hike. We only hiked about a mile through the woods - enough to see some of the highlights of the park at this time of year.

The mountain laurel was in bloom...and the bees were enjoying the nectar.

And then their were ferns - at least three different kinds. They were well past the fiddlehead stage and transforming swaths of forest floor with their floating green. Stumps and fallen trees peek through the fronds in the slide show below.

The mosses grew in cracks of rocks and nearly covered others making them look like green islands in the leaf mulch of the forest. They seemed to not grow so well on the quartz as they did on the other rocks.

There was plenty of evidence of the storm that came through the night before: the muddy trail, small branches with green leaves detached from their tree laying on the trail with water droplets still intact.

The insects were warming up as we got ready to leave; next time we'll try to remember the insect repellent!

There was a Camellia Show at Brookside Gardens this past Saturday. I enjoyed walking through it and taking pictures. There are a number of aspects to the flowers that I was trying to capture: many yellow stamens, vein patterns in their petals, varying colors of the petals, and the slight variations of the petals themselves.

Many of the ferns had already unfurled with the earlier warmth this spring but there were still a few fiddleheads.

The tulips are also most their prime so I found myself looking at the color variations in their petals - like the purple and white below. And then there are other springtime flowers - Jack-in-the-Pulpits, wisteria, dogwood, azaleas and other bulbs. Spring has sprung!