Visiting today was extremely therapeutic. It feels like spring is finally here with the warm rains and glistening sun. As I strolled around, I kept an eye out for new life sprouting through the soil. Among the wet leaves, I found a couple exciting things … no wildflowers, but some fiddleheads 🙂 There were SO many of them. I knew fiddleheads were a desirable commodity, so I was surprised to see them all around. When we visited the floodplain forest in lab, there were signs with restrictions about how many fiddleheads each household could harvest, and when we walked through, I did not see many. There’s a goldmine of them behind the Aiken Forestry Research Center, but I guess because of the lack of foot traffic there, they can live out their lives and become full-grown ferns.
Some others plants have begun to sprout up through the leaf litter as well, but I was not able to identify them as they did not have any flowers. The deciduous trees have not caught up to their coniferous friends yet – still as bare as they were in the dead of winter. I did spot mushrooms growing on nearly all of the Paper Birch though.
