Azalea State Natural Reserve
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It's April, so time to check on the azaleas. The web page for the reserve says they should be blooming in April and May. I wasn't expecting much. The listing for Rhododendron occidentale on iNaturalist does show an increase of observations in April, but the majority are May, June, July. The number of observations marked "flowering" lags a little with "budding" coming up most in April and May, but only about 16% of observations have had anyone bother to mark them at all. I didn't find much. They might be leafing out to try to identify them from the nude sticks, but none were ready to flower and none of the leaves I photographed were them. I did find other flowers as I toured the loops in exactly the same order. It had been a nice order.
Someone had been cutting back a few things by the trail. I got around the corner to find that someone had done a bunch of work on the area. Really, they'd worked it over. Stumps a few inches off the ground, the biggest about a foot across, and wood chips and one lone trillium in the blazing sun. The ivy appeared to be gone too, but just from that section.
Around the next corner, it was all back to normal. Ivy and all.
I started around the second route. I found some of the twinberry honeysuckle way up high before coming to the ivy and the other vine that seemed to grow a lot like ivy but would put out branches and had much wider leaves. Oh, and the berries sticking up from it all. That's also ivy. The mature branches take on that different morphology.
I spotted a lot more of the grand firs now that I knew what they were. There's much more than the one down at the bottom. In spite of all the work that had happened below, the tree was still across the path at the top of the trail.
So I came to the same conclusion of the hike as before. No azaleas in bloom to see, but I thought it was still a bit early.
©2021 Valerie Norton
Written 11 Apr 2021
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