Summer wildflowers are brightening up the mountains. One of the easiest ways to get a look at this colorful parade is to take a drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway. You don’t have to be a skilled botanist to enjoy this parade. There are enough showy, easy-to-identify wildflowers in bloom that even a novice can have a great time. A small photographic field guide such as Great Smoky Mountains Wildflowers or Wild Flowers of North Carolina will have most of the common species.

Some of the large, showy species will dominate the roadsides. Large stands of robust, many flowered Turk’s-cap lilies, Lilium superbum, are impressive. This plant may grow to 10 feet tall and have 20 or more spectacular orange and brown spotted flowers with recurved petals.

Carolina lily, Lilium Michauxii, is a not so robust cousin often found in the same vicinity. The flowers are very similar but where turk’s cap has many flowers borne along the last foot or so of stem, Carolina lily will have only a few blooms (usually four or fewer) borne only from the very top of the stem.

Another large wildflower prominent along the Parkway is black cohosh. There are two species in our area; Cimicifuga racemosa and C. americana. They are very similar, but C. american has three to eight pistils while C. racemosa has only one.

Black cohosh may reach eight feet tall. It has long, wand-like racemes of white flowers on sparsely leafed stalks.

Your eyes will be drawn to many shades of yellow along the Parkway. Black-eyed Susans, Rudbeckia hirta, are being joined by other, yellow asters. Asters are a large and complex group of flowers. There are three fairly common species of Rudbeckia in WNC and half a dozen or so species of sunflower, Helianthus. The simple guides mentioned above don’t go into much detail with regards to asters, but that doesn’t detract from their beauty.

Other shades of yellow include a couple of species of Oenothera. Sundrops, Oenothera fruticosa, is beginning to wane. This two- to three-foot tall “sundrop” yellow wildflower blooms primarily from May through July.

The other species, Oenothera biennis, is known as evening primrose, and its flowers are not fully unfurled until night. It generally blooms profusely, however, and still offers quite a bit of color during the daylight hours. Because of its nocturnal blooming, evening primrose is pollinated primarily by moths.

Wet acidic soils along the roadside may produce large stands of crimson bee-balm, Monarda didyma. When you stop your car and get out to examine these eye-catching crimson flowers you may begin to notice similar, paler blooms. Monarda is a complex genus with different species ranging from the crimson, M. didyma, to the pale, M. fistulosa, to the fuchsia, M. media.

Another large (six foot) wildflower blooming now along the Parkway is tall bellflower, Campanula americana. Tall bellflower has numerous blue to lavender flowers nearly an inch wide along its stalk. It has a long style which protrudes and turns up sharply at the end.

Just beginning to bloom is another large aster, Joe-pye-weed, Eupatorium maculatum. This plant may reach a height of 15 feet. The large, hollow stem is ringed with whorls of long leaves. The inflorescence may be more than a foot across. It is made up many small purplish flower heads.

As an added color attraction, many butterflies may be found nectaring at these summer wildflowers. Pipevine swallow tails seem to have a penchant for the turk’s cap lilies. These large black butterflies create quite a contrast to the bright orange flowers.

Yellow and black tiger swallowtails may also be seen nectaring as well as some of the golden fritillaries. The small field guide, Butterflies Through Binoculars, can help you identify some of these colorful creatures visiting the copious summer wildflowers.

(Hendershot can be reached at don@smokymountainnews.com)

 

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