Sep 6 A Blue Tower

 

Traveling along the Blue Ridge Parkway or Rt 19 at Soco Gap, this is your view. Looks like a fire tower but it is not. Try to find it and you can't. It wasn't there last year but it is now. We stopped and looked at it and tried to find a route to it. So I did what many people do now, googled "blue tower at Soco Gap". Oddly, the cell reception was off the charts at this remote spot. That should have been a hint that it is a cell tower. A cell tower on private property within the Qualla Reservation. Designed to blend in? Yes, designed to look like something you might expect to see out here. 

Aug 1 My Carolina Lily Update

 

Back in April I began seeing the early plant structures for Lilium michauxii appearing. They are rather uniquely shaped and easy to spot once you know what you are looking for. Once I spotted a few, I pin flagged them so I could monitor them. Overall I located 5 areas which indicates to me that they propagate fairly easily via seeds. Deer love them so they often disappear before they bloom and as they bloom and after they bloom. Hence the need for the pin flags. My Spring tally was 49. There was one area of closely clumped plants which I enclosed with wire fencing. Others I tried to protect with small wire exclosures but found them difficult to secure in the ground. A few I dug up and transplanted to better protected areas. 

Then came bloom time in late July. Five in my large exclosure bloomed for about 3 days. One of last year's transplants bloomed for about a week. It is pictured above. Plans for next bloom season are evolving. Hopefully, I'll have a nice report next year.

oops, a bit early for these seeds