On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Good Morning All,
This weekday feature is for Juicers who are are on the road, traveling, or just want to share a little bit of their world via stories and pictures. So many of us rise each morning, eager for something beautiful, inspiring, amazing, subtle, of note, and our community delivers – a view into their world, whether they’re far away or close to home – pictures with a story, with context, with meaning, sometimes just beauty. By concentrating travel updates and tips here, it’s easier for all of us to keep up or find them later.
So please, speak up and share some of your adventures and travel news here, and submit your pictures using our speedy, secure form. You can submit up to 7 pictures at a time, with an overall description and one for each picture.
You can, of course, send an email with pictures if the form gives you trouble, or if you are trying to submit something special, like a zipped archive or a movie. If your pictures are already hosted online, then please email the links with your descriptions.
For each picture, it’s best to provide your commenter screenname, description, where it was taken, and date. It’s tough to keep everyone’s email address and screenname straight, so don’t assume that I remember it “from last time”. More and more, the first photo before the fold will be from a commenter, so making it easy to locate the screenname when I’ve found a compelling photo is crucial.
Have a wonderful day, and enjoy the pictures!
Today, pictures from valued commenter J R in WV.
Spring Flowers
Around the “yard” these are some recent pictures of the spring flowers.
Little Blue Flowers
Taken on 2018-04-19
Right outside the front door.
I don’t know what these are. Wife brought them home some years ago and put them in boxes on the little bridge by the front door. They’ve reoccurred every spring now, so must be pretty winter-hardy. Greenery stays green year-round.
F4.5 for 1/1600 sec. 88mm ISO400
Little White Flowers
Taken on 2018-04-19
Forested hillside near our home.
Wild flowers, we get lots of these every spring on the forest floor. Did know the name, can’t remember it. Bonus May Apple in the backgound.
f/4.5 for 1/100 sec at 196mm ISO 125
Little White Flowers
Taken on 2018-04-19
Different spot on same forested hillside.
A different shot of the same species of little white flowers. There’s some pink in there too, but mostly white.
f/3.f for 1/200 sec at 44 mm ISO 125
Ramps spreading in the afternoon sun
Taken on 2018-04-19
West side of front yard, near the house.
This is what ramps look like happily growing on a hillside in the afternoon sun. I planted these, as locally they are extinct from over harvesting. They’re very close to the house, so no one will harvest all of them one day.
I do harvest a few small batches each spring, they’re doing very well, and have real balls on their bottoms from growing for multiple years before they get dug up. Yumm! By mid-May the turn yellow and fade away til next year.
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f/3.9 for 1/200 sec at 164mm ISO 125
White Violets
Taken on 2018-04-19
Front yard
White Violets, which I know is kind of a self-contradiction. We have a ton of these, they seem to be doing quite well in shady damp places.
f/4.0 for 1/125sec at 400mm ISO 250
Thank you so much J R in WV, do send us more when you can.
Travel safely everybody, and do share some stories in the comments, even if you’re joining the conversation late. Many folks confide that they go back and read old threads, one reason these are available on the Quick Links menu.
One again, to submit pictures: Use the Form or Send an Email
OzarkHillbilly
The first ones are Sweet Williams, a wild phlox that smell ohsosweet.
Not sure about 2 and 3, was going to say Spring Beauties but without definitive foliage I can’t be sure.
Mary G
Lovely flowers.
J R in WV
@OzarkHillbilly:
I never noticed any aroma, and I’ve been quite close to them, but I’ll make it a point to smell them asap, probably next spring. Thanks for the tips.
The potential Spring Beauties have longer leaves that aren’t particularly organized around their stem, if that helps. I think that’s the name others have told me. When it gets light I’ll look in the wildflower book for a picture of both flowers. There are a ton of the Spring Beauties around in April and May.
JPL
@J R in WV: Thanks for the pictures.
Alain the site fixer
@J R in WV: I didn’t plan to run these today but am fighting major issue with the server that hosts the form and so I had to clean off all submissions before restoring from a known good version. I’ll add your house to next sets, sorry!
Currants
JR in WV. LOVE the photos. Especially the ramps! Later in the summer they send up classic little allium stalks with blossoms on them—but there are no leaves, so you have to go looking to find them. In theory, they drop seeds which will also reproduce, but that’s a longer term project. I picked up ramps from the New England Wildflower Society about 3 or 4 years ago. Planted them in two locations and they’re still here and doing well! One of them is in a more east/south facing area and shows up much earlier in the spring than I would think, the other is more west/south—less sun, shows up later. I know you can harvest some of the leaves without destroying the plant population but I haven’t dared to do that yet, and I don’t have enough to even think about taking bulbs. Thanks for the photos!
debbie
Even the smallest spring flowers are lovely. Thanks!
Joey Maloney
Well, fuck. Tony Bourdain killed himself. CNN story
rikyrah
Sometimes, you just need the beauty of nature. Thanks.
Mr. Prosser
Enjoyed the photos and learned something new; never heard of ramps before today. Thanks
stinger
Lovely flowers — I have white violets scattered throughout my lawn, too, along with several variations of the purple variety. Not familiar with the other eastern woodland plants shown here.
Humdog
The first flowers are indeed phlox, but not all varieties are highly fragrant.
J R in WV
@Mr. Prosser:
“…never heard of ramps before today…”
I’m sorry I didn’t say more about them. They grow all over the eastern part of the continent, from Georgia to Michigan, in shady northern exposures mostly. They are one of the earliest food stuffs to sprout up in the spring, and were a famous “spring tonic” after a long winter on preserved foods back in the day of subsistence farming as a way of life.
They are a member of the same family as onions and garlic, can be quite pungent, and are long gone as a leafy green already. They turn yellow and vanish around here in early May. Young plants are like scallions when dug, more mature plants have little round bulbs more like onions. Many of them will be tightly connected at their roots, and they spread by putting out shoots underground.
I knew they formed seeds, but learned from commenter Currants that they put up shoots with tiny blooms later in the summer. I’ll have to keep an eye on the patches where they grow, I’ll try to catch a picture of those blooms later on.
Here people go into the woods to dig ramps in the spring, and many young men will sell them by busy roads at wide spots, with coolers full of freshly dug ramps. When I was commuting to work I would stop on the way home in spring and buy several bundles, and then plant some out on the hillsides around the house.
As I said, they can be driven into extinction by over harvesting, which I understand has happened in the Great Smoky Mountains Nation Park, which is really sad. The tragedy of the commons. I planted my ramps very close to the house to discourage neighbors from taking them all, which many people would do if they were walking the woods and saw a big patch.
From now on, we’ll always have ramps in the spring right here at home. I hope!
Dan B
1 is probably a good blue form of Phlox divaricata, a clumping groundcover native to eastern US woodlands.
2 is probably Spring Beauty, Claytonia virginica.
We saw hundreds of western Spring Beauty in a trip to the east (much drier) Cascades about an hour from Seattle. Our friend who grew up in eastern Washington (Grand Coulee Dam, a very arid location) was impressed with the wildflowers. On the east slope of the Cascades they’re Vernal (Spring) because of summer drought. In the eastern US they’re Vernal because the understory is shaded once the deciduous forest leafs out.