Early Spring Wildflowers Along the Panhandle Trail and Nature Walk

Wildflowers of early spring are a celebration in the woods though they are nowhere near as showy as summer and fall wildflowers. Muted colors, smaller flowers and shorter plants often leave them unnoticed by someone on foot or on a bicycle, but if you know what to look for and where to look you'll see a welcome splash of yellow or purple.

Some flowers are often called "spring ephemerals" for the ones that appear sometimes even in snow, bloom, bear seed and disappear by summer, to reappear as early as possible the following spring. Others bloom and die back to just a rosette of leaves on the ground, or lose their flowers but leaves will remain all summer and turn colorful in autumn, even with interesting seed pods.

I've been documenting my walks along local trails and in the woods to capture the flora you'd see as you walked. I'm familiar enough with the trails near me to know what blooms when, since it's been one of my projects from before my digital camera. I've got loads of shots on film, but they aren't in sequence as these are, and in the process I've developed a style that I like, a shallow depth of field that focuses intensely on the flower, or a leaf, or even an insect, and puts the background in a softened focus.

This project is intended to one day become an online and perhaps print reference for the wildflowers of the Lower Chartiers Watershed, so I'll be keeping them organized by trail. Wildflowers are amazingly predictable, and anyone else would be able to walk the trail around the same time I did in another year and see these wildflowers in about this sequence. So far I've photographed the Panhandle Trail area, and also Kane's Woods in Scott Township, and Wingfield Pines and the Open Classroom areas in Boyce-Mayview Park in Upper St. Clair, to name a few.

These images are provided for familiarity rather than strict scientific identification; I am not a scientist, and my goal is first to take good photographs, then to give people a general appreciation of the beauty of their local wildflowers. The names are accurate, but I'll keep to the most common name to make it easier for you to find these in guidebooks and pursue more information. Just enjoy looking at them! They can be found along the Nature Walk along the Panhandle Trail as well as anywhere in the woods long the trail.

Also visit the other slideshows of local wildflowers through the summer and flora and fauna galleries under "Nature" on my website and on my daily photo and art blog "Today".

Click here to bring up the slideshow.

NOTE: The slideshow will pop up as a flash slideshow in a new window. Hold your mouse anywhere over the slideshow to see the image title at the top, hold your mouse over the image number at the bottom to see a thumbnail.

~~~~~
© 2014 Published by Bernadette E. Kazmarski

 All images used in this post are copyrighted to Bernadette E. Kazmarski unless otherwise noted and may not be used without my written permission. Please ask if you are interested in using one in a print or internet publication. If you are interested in purchasing a print of this image or a product including this image, check my Etsy shop or Fine Art America profile to see if I have it available already. If you don’t find it there, visit Ordering Custom Artwork for more information on a custom greeting card, print or other item.