Last night, I received the wonderful news that a rare orchid, Arethusa bulbosa or Dragon’s Mouth orchid also known as Swamp Pink was just found in a remote site in Transylvania County, North Carolina! It is rare in the sense that it has not been seen in North Carolina in more than 15 years and

Early on Saturday morning, May 24, we had a leisurely breakfast near our motel in Shallotte, North Carolina, and headed out to meet two photography buddies, Kelvin Taylor and Skip Pudney. Both Kelvin and Skip share my love for the orchids and wildflowers of the Southeast. Skip lives about 30 minutes from the Green Swamp,

In order to pay justice to all of the orchids and wildflowers we saw this past weekend along the Carolina Atlantic Coastal Plain, I have decided to split the trip report into two blog entries: Part one for the Francis Marion National Forest in Berkeley County, South Carolina and Part two for the Green Swamp

While searching through my image archives, looking for pictures I took on this date last year or the year before, I found images of Aplectrum hyemale or Puttyroot orchid also known as Adam-and-Eve orchid. Since there are several locations for this species within a couple of hours of home, I decided to head out early

Sometimes things don’t work out as you had planned — sometimes they do… On Saturday, May 17, Alan Cressler, Max Medley, and I met Flickr friend Andrew Gibson in the Walmart parking lot in Ellijay, Georgia. The expressed purpose of Ohio native, Andrew Gibson, was to see and photograph a rare orchid that has been

We usually take a winding mountain road, U.S. Hwy. 276, up the Blue Ridge Escarpment to reach the Dupont State Forest, which is just across the border between South Carolina and North Carolina. This 10,000+ acre tract is a working forest managed by the North Carolina Forest Service, and it is available to the public

After leaving the Francis Marion National Forest and my two Atlanta buddies Alan and Steve on Saturday, I headed up the coast to Shallotte, North Carolina where I spent the night in anticipation of my visit to the Green Swamp Preserve and Shaken Creek Preserve. Both are managed by The Nature Conservancy. I have been

Early on Saturday morning (5:30 am to be precise), May 3, I left for one of my favorite places for Spring wildflowers — the Francis Marion National Forest in Berkeley County, near Charleston, South Carolina. It’s a large holding – more than 250,000 acres of bottom-land swamps and Longleaf pine savannahs. Today, it is the

Anyone who photographs wildflowers in the Carolinas knows that this is a particularly busy time of the year, especially in the upper Piedmont and Mountains. So, for the past few days, I’ve been hitting my favorite haunts in the upstate of South Carolina as well as the first range of low mountains in North Carolina — namely