The Woodlawn Trustees Preserve is a large area of open space located in North Wilmington, Delaware, that lies along the west side of Route 202. It’s somewhat difficult to determine when you are on Woodlawn land, since signage is minimal, but most of the fields are lined with large boulders. I mostly hike the area …
Tag : Flora and Fauna
13 posts
What’s in bloom in late April? Not all that much in my garden. I’ve got two azaleas in bloom, a bunch of bulbs, and some pansies I just purchased from an unnamed big box store. Oops, there goes my resolution to buy from a local garden center. Of course, my garden is mostly about texture …
Today I’m posting a set of beautiful photographs of Chester County, Pennsylvania, mostly in the southeastern part of the county, especially around Kennett Square, Longwood Gardens, and the Brandywine River. These were taken by my talented aunt who is always willing to share with me. Enjoy!
One creature I haven’t seen in my backyard is the box turtle. Turtles are in decline in my mid-Atlantic region, mostly due to suburban sprawl. The box turtle’s home range is usually about 12 to 14 acres. Box turtles are slow crawlers, extremely long lived, slow to mature, and have relatively few offspring per year. …
Sorry for the alliteration. Couldn’t help it. Like many other gardeners, I’ve discovered the amazing energy created when you pair a purple/burgundy foliage plant with one that sports that bright greenish yellow color we either love or hate: chartreuse. Never one to go half measures, I decided to apply this color scheme to my ENTIRE …
As someone who hates to eat mushrooms, I surprise myself by being kind of fascinated with these fungi. I think it’s because I associate them with fairies, gnomes, and pixies, my favorite forest dwellers. It’s certainly not the fact that they are associated with male virility because of the phallic shape, ugh. Nope, for me, …
This is the time of year when I really begin dreaming about warm weather and spring and sunshine and flowers and getting back into the garden. Plant catalogs are rolling in to tempt me with new cultivars, seed packets are showing up in stores, and gardening is just around the corner. One of my wish …
Imagine my shock when I saw a fire-engine red lizard face sticking out of my rock wall in the garden. I yelled for my husband: “There’s a giant salamander out here!” Because of course I know we don’t have lizards in Delaware. Salamanders, however, are a different matter. I see them all the time in …
Meet Yolanda, our backyard raccoon. She lives in a strip of woods behind our house that is owned by the county, so her actual home tree is not in our backyard, but we like to think she is ours, partly because of her many foraging trips to our yard. Her tree is a larger tree …
The American Eastern Yellow Fly Agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria var. guessowii) appear during periods of high humidity in our conifer forests, often growing under white pine or eastern hemlock trees. It’s characterized by white gills and stem, a white spore print, warts on the cap which easily wash or rub off, a membranous partial veil …