Wildflowers at Choctaw Lake

Every two months or so my family joins a few friends with kids to walk around Choctaw Lake in the Tombigbee National Forest (near Ackerman, in Choctaw County, about twenty minutes west of Starkville). The above photo was taken last October. Even though I probably pushed the saturation up a little too much (it was a very sunny day and the photos were pretty washed out color-wise), you can see that the pine forest behind the bench was recently burned. Judgin by the open character of the woods understory, it appears to me that most of the area around Choctaw Lake is burned on a regular basis.

This is another shot from last fall. Black-eyed Susans growing lakeside under an oak.

This panorama shows a moisture gradient expressed in plant strata. Grasses and sedges at the water margin, tag alders above that, maples and other hardwoods (gums?) above that, with pines on the drier areas upslope. The late Ed Blake taught me to see this.

This is the boardwalk through the tag alder grove that you see in the panorama above. A small girl from our group poses at the vanishing point. All of the above photos were taken in October of 2011.


These next photos were taken this past April. The Tombigbee is in the North Central Hills physiographic region. Starkville is more of a flatwoods kind of system, with patches of Blackland Prairie chalk outcrops. A greater variety of spring ephemerals can be found in the hills than in the flatwoods. At least that's what David Evans in the Forestry Department told me. I think the fire regime helps. Anyway, most of what follows has not been seen by me in Oktibbeha County (yet).

This Indian Pink, Spigelia marilandica, I might never have identified if it weren't for the book Wildflower Watch by Margaret Gratz. The only reason I have this book is because I happened to be in the Barnes and Noble Bookstore on campus one day when Mrs. Gratz was signing copies. I got into a conversation with her about local wildflowers. Looking through the book, I noticed that most of the flowers were pretty common and were probably covered in my other books. Also, I thought her descriptions of the flowers was a little corny. But she was sitting right there, and she was such a nice, charming person, and I did indeed feel that I should have a book with a local perspective, so I bought it. Back in my home state of North Carolina, many botany freaks and nature lovers like myself consider Wildflowers of North Carolina, by William Justice, C. Ritchie Bell and Anne H. Lindsey, to be one of the greatest books ever written. But this Indian Pink is not in Wildflowers of North Carolina. Nor is it in the two wildflower books I always bring with me into the field, and which have never let me down (until now): the Peterson Field Guide to Wildflowers of Northeastern/Northcentral America and Newcomb's Wildflower Guide. So Thank You Margaret Gratz!

Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Arisaema triphyllum, is in just about every wildflower book and I was very happy to see it out at Choctaw Lake.

Finding these trilliums was also a treat. Justice, Bell, and Lindsey list nine species of trillium in their North Carolina book. Gratz only mentions the species cuneatum, which I am pretty sure is what we have here.

Gratz writes that this Coreopsis tinctoria, or Garden Coreopsis, is an escaped introduction from the western United States. Dozens of other coreopsis species are mentioned in my reference books, but, outside of Gratz, the only book to include tinctoria is Peterson's. Peterson confirms that this is an escape from the Manitoba/Minnesota west area.

Each of my four wildflower books is organized differently, and the organization reflects each writer's understanding of how to observe and understand wildflowers. Peterson's, probably the most popular, goes for what the general user is most likely to notice first: color. The problem with color is that there are many gradations of hue, especially from red to pink, or red to purple. I have found Newcomb's to be the most useful in the field when it comes to identifying wildflowers. It is based on keys that organize flowers based on the number of petals, then break them out in terms of opposite or alternate leaves, basal leaves or not, and other features. Gratz organizes her flowers temporally -by season- so if you are looking for a particular flower you first navigate to the approximate season then start flipping pages. Flipping pages is something you get used to with Justice, Bell and Lindsey as well, since it is arranged by the rather specialized rubric of taxonomy, or plant families. I have had the Justice, Bell and Lindsey book close at hand for a very long time, and in my early, youthful attempts to learn about wildflowers their organization would frustrate me. Over time, I got to enjoy the necessity of flipping pages, meeting new characters in the understory drama, and developing a vague appreciation for how taxonomy works.