April, my most favorite month, is when the landscape bursts into every shade of green and wildflowers sport every hue of the rainbow. “April is a reminder that life is a beautiful, ever-renewing cycle,” wrote poet E.E. Cummings.
For me, there’s no better celebration of Georgia’s superb spring beauty and biodiversity than the Georgia Botanical Society’s Wildflower Pilgrimage.
The three-day gathering of nature lovers takes place each spring in a different part of the state and offers several field trips to surrounding natural areas, many of them off the beaten path. This year’s Pilgrimage, held last weekend, was headquartered in LaGrange in west Georgia. As usual, the event provided chances to explore areas in the surrounding terrain, including places seldom visited by the public because of their remoteness, private ownership or strict protection.
LaGrange’s location near the Chattahoochee River and the impounded West Point Lake made those two water bodies some of the focal points of this year’s Pilgrimage. Some of the event’s 16 field trips took participants along the lake and along the river and its tributaries to see botanical wonders in floodplain forests and other wetland habitats.
Another focal point near LaGrange was the magnificent Franklin D. Roosevelt State Park on Pine Mountain in Harris and Meriwether counties. I participated in an all-day field trip that took us along several trails in the mountain park. As our leader, Hal Massie, noted, Pine Mountain is where one would not expect a mountain to be — in Middle Georgia, some 150 miles south of the much larger, better-known Appalachian Mountains whose peaks, ridges and valleys dominate most of North Georgia’s landscape.
Massie led us to a secret spot on Pine Mountain where one of Georgia’s rarest wildflowers was recently discovered, the Pine Mountain leatherflower. Because of its exceptional rarity, Massie swore us to secrecy about its exact location on the mountain.
IN THE SKY: From David Dundee, Tellus Science Museum astronomer: The annual Lyrid meteor shower will reach a peak of about 20 meteors per hour in the northeast sky on Sunday night.
The moon will be full on Tuesday — the Flower Moon. Mars and Saturn are in the east sky just before sunrise. Jupiter is low in the west just after dark. Mercury and Venus are not easily seen now.
Charles Seabrook can be reached at charles.seabrook@yahoo.com.
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