A few odds and ends from my hike up on Snake Hill yesterday. I was looking for a big rattler to photograph but had to settle for a junior-sized youngster coiled up on a rock ledge (see earlier post). More finds: great rhododendron (Rhododendron maximum), which starts to bloom as the mountain laurel flowers fade; Indian cucumber-root (Medeola virginiana) an edible shade-lover with delicate, suspended flowers; partridgeberry (Mitchella repens) a lovely trailing vine whose white flowers are replaced by blazing red berries in the fall; whorled loosestrife (Lysimachia quadrifolia), a harbinger of summer in Appalachia; Indian pipe (Monotropa uniflora), a parasitic perennial herb also known as ghost plant and corpse plant; black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta), a short-lived perennial that never fails to give me a warm fuzzy inside; American black elderberry (Sambucus canadensis), also known as American elder and Canada elderberry, whose dark, ripe berries will shortly be fermenting in impromptu home wineries throughout Appalachia; and a red eft, the juvenile form of the eastern newt (Notophthalmus viridescens); starting its perilous journey to adulthood.
