Highlands Biological Station · Highlands, North Carolina
A walk through the gardens in July
Twelve acres on the Highlands plateau, walked in order. The map keeps pace as you read — sixteen stops, in at the north gate and out at the south. The photographs are what the staff found along the way. Pick a month and take the walk as it stood that month.
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North Gateway
The Teaching Pavilion in Winter
The John W. "Sto" Stowers Jr. Teaching Pavilion sits at the edge of a frozen lake under a rime of new snow, its green roof reduced to a stubble of dormant sedum. Classes meet here from spring through fall. In January it is simply a roof over ice, which is its own kind of instruction.
Pollinator Garden
Golden Ragwort
Packera aurea
Golden ragwort blazes across late spring with an electric warmth—dozens of small, daisy-like flowers clustered tight, each centered with a burnished disc. The plant thrives in the gardens' sunnier reaches, its cheerful yellow a signal to pollinators that the season is fully underway. By midsummer, these same flowers will have scattered seed across the soil, sowing next year's bright abundance.
Morning Mist over the Pollinator Meadow
Late-summer mist lifts off the lake behind the Stowers Teaching Pavilion while black-eyed Susans and spent seedheads catch the first sun. The pavilion carries its own small meadow overhead on its green roof. By September the planting has gone well past tidy and into abundance, which is the point — nearly everything standing here is food or shelter for something.
Webworm Moth on White Snakeroot
An ailanthus webworm moth works a head of white snakeroot, its orange-and-cream mosaic folded so tightly around its body that it reads more like a beetle than a moth. Snakeroot blooms late and generously, feeding whatever is still flying in September. The plant is toxic to livestock and was once the cause of milk sickness; the insects are unbothered.
Great Blue Lobelia
Lobelia siphilitica
Great blue lobelia opens from the bottom of the spike upward, so one stem carries fresh flowers, spent ones, and tight buds all at once. The color is the unusual part — a true saturated blue, rare in this flora — and bumblebees force their way into the tube to get at it. It wants wet feet and returns a month of late-summer color.
Seedheads over Ice
Round seedheads hold their snow above the frozen lake, each one a spent flower that has already done its work. Leaving them standing through winter is deliberate: the stems shelter overwintering insects and the seeds feed birds long past the point when the planting looks finished. Tidiness would cost more than it is worth.
Cattails on the Frozen Lake
Cattails stand over the frozen lake with their seedheads coming apart, releasing what the wind has not already taken. Snow dusts the shrub layer below. Everything visible here is last year's growth, still upright and still doing work — holding the bank, sheltering whatever overwinters inside it, waiting to fall.
Beebalm by the Lake
Monarda didyma
A single scarlet beebalm flower blooms among tall meadow plants and rattlesnake master at a pond's edge, with a low bridge and forested hill under a cloudy sky beyond.
Pickerelweed
Pontederia cordata
Violet-blue pickerelweed blooms among broad green leaves at a pond's edge, with a low bridge, forested hillside, and blue sky reflected in the water beyond.
Pollinator Meadow in Full Bloom
Pink-purple coneflowers, golden black-eyed Susans, and lavender asters bloom together in a dense, lush summer wildflower meadow.
Turtle Bay
Snapping Turtle in the Shallows
Seen from above through clear shallow water, a snapping turtle holds still on the bottom, its ridged carapace furred with algae and its long serrated tail trailing behind. This is the posture snappers keep most of the time — motionless, half-buried, waiting. On land they are famously bad-tempered; in water they would rather you not notice them at all.
Snapping Turtle Surfacing
A common snapping turtle breaks the surface of the lake, nostrils and eyes just clear of the water and the rest of it — considerable — hidden below. Snappers spend most of their lives on the bottom, walking rather than swimming, coming up only to breathe. They are ordinary here and easy to miss, which describes most of what lives in the lake.
Eastern Screech-Owl
A red-morph eastern screech-owl sits in the mouth of a nest box with its eyes closed against the daylight, doing what screech-owls do for most of the daylight hours. The species comes in rufous and gray forms, both of which vanish against bark. The box is one of several on the grounds; this one has clearly been accepted.
Rhododendron Over the Lily Pond
Pale pink rosebay rhododendron blooms frame a quiet lily pond dotted with pads and reflections, a green hillside rising beyond.
Lakeside Bog
Skunk Cabbage
Symplocarpus foetidus
Skunk cabbage emerges through a late-season snow, its thermogenic spathe generating enough heat to melt a path through winter. The plant's distinctive maroon-mottled envelope—striped with pale yellow—encloses the golden spadix, where hundreds of tiny flowers wait to bloom. Few plants in the southern Appalachian spring can muscle their way through snow this way; fewer still announce their arrival with such botanical defiance.
Station archive
Grass-of-Parnassus
Parnassia asarifolia
Grass-of-Parnassus is not a grass at all — the name is a two-thousand-year-old mistake that has simply stuck. What matters is the flower: five white petals scored with fine green veins that lead pollinators inward like runway lights, ringed by yellow-tipped false stamens that make no pollen and exist mainly to look convincing. It blooms in seeps and wet ground in late summer.
Swamp Pink
Helonias bullata
Swamp pink lifts its rose-colored spires above a mat of strap-shaped leaves — one of the rarest plants in the southern Appalachians and federally threatened across its range. It needs saturated ground with cool water moving through it, conditions vanishing almost everywhere else it grows. Along the wet edges of the gardens, it still blooms on schedule each April.
Water Lily After Rain
A single white water lily with a golden center floats among rain-dotted lily pads and slender emergent grasses on dark, still pond water.
Boardwalk
Jewelweed
Jewelweed hangs its spotted orange trumpets on thread-thin stalks, each one shaped to fit a hummingbird's bill and very little else. Break a stem and it runs with watery sap long used to take the sting out of nettle and the itch out of poison ivy. It grows wherever the ground stays damp, which in these mountains is nearly everywhere.
Turk's Cap Lily
A single orange Turk's cap lily with strongly recurved, dark-spotted petals hangs in sharp focus among slender green buds, more lilies blurred in the meadow beyond.
Wild Blackberries Ripening
A wild bramble cane hung with clusters of blackberries in stages of ripening, from red and unripe to a single dark, ripe fruit, among toothed green leaves.
Summer on the Bog Boardwalk
Yellow-flowered shrubs line a boardwalk railing leading to a green-roofed shelter at the edge of a mountain bog, forested hills and blue sky beyond.
Two Blue Eggs in the Nest
Two smooth, turquoise-blue eggs rest together in a woven twig nest cupped among green leaves.
Fern Garden
Dwarf Crested Iris
Iris cristata
Dwarf crested iris clusters low among the leaves of early spring, its purple-blue petals crowned with golden crests so precise they might have been painted by hand. These miniature irises—barely a hand's breadth tall—are a gardener's reward for patience and a naturalist's delight: proof that some of the most intricate beauty in the spring woods asks nothing of us but attention.
Station archive
Rhododendron Along the Path
Pale pink rhododendron blooms arch over a narrow gravel path enclosed by dense evergreen foliage, forming a shaded green tunnel.
Rhododendron in Bloom
Clusters of pink-and-white rhododendron flowers and rose-pink buds open across a leafy native shrub in dappled woodland light.
Moss Garden
Ghost Pipe on the Forest Floor
A cluster of waxy, translucent white ghost pipe stems, their flower heads nodding, rises from the leaf litter and woody debris of the forest floor.
Rock Outcrop Garden
Fiddleheads and Foamflower
Cinnamon fern fiddleheads unspool at the foot of a moss-covered stump while foamflower sends up its first white spires behind them. This is the gardens in mid-April — everything half-open, nothing yet at full height, the whole understory still deciding how tall it intends to get. Come back in three weeks and none of it will look the same.
Historic Garden
Appalachian Ethnobotanical Garden
Homeowner's Demonstration Garden
Moss and Stone
A low bank of moss runs alongside the path, holding ferns, seedlings, and enough water to matter. Moss has no roots and no vascular tissue; it takes what it needs straight from the air and the rain, which in Highlands is a workable strategy. Cardinal flower burns red in the background, but the moss is the reason this ground stays cool.
The Stone Path in Late Summer
The stone path narrows into the beds and disappears, black-eyed Susans and cardinal flower crowding one edge while blue lobelia climbs the other. Nothing here is planted in rows. The gardens are built to be walked slowly and looked into rather than at, and by late August the plants have claimed the path's edges as their own.
Pavilion and Lawn
Woodland Way
Oconee Bells
Shortia galacifolia
Oconee bells bloom low and bright against the forest floor, their white petals rimmed with rose-pink sepals opening one by one across the moss-covered stones of the high country. Endemic to a narrow stretch of the southern Blue Ridge, Shortia galacifolia anchors itself in cool, moist coves—a botanical reminder of the deep time written into these mountains. Each spring, it returns to the same shaded place, a small pink-and-white assertion of belonging.
Station archive
Mottled Heartleaf on the Forest Floor
A pair of heart-shaped leaves marbled in silver and deep green spreads low over the forest floor, a fern unfurling nearby.
Ferns and Galax
Lacy ferns and rounded, glossy galax leaves grow together over a moss-covered log at the edge of a woodland path.
Rain Demonstration Garden
Creekside Glade
Green-and-Gold
Chrysogonum virginianum
Green-and-gold spreads across the forest floor like a living testament to its name—the glossy green leaves and bright yellow flowers in perfect balance. Chrysogonum virginianum thrives in the shade of hardwoods, its low, spreading habit making it an ideal groundcover for the gardens' woodland edges. From spring through summer, it blooms steadily, unfussy and reliable, asking little but providing years of golden light in the shadowed places.
Station archive
Creek Bank in Snow
A shallow creek runs clear beneath a snow-covered bank, exposed roots holding the cut edge together and rhododendron leaning low over the water. The leaves have curled tight — a response to cold rather than drought, and a reliable way to read the temperature without a thermometer. Near freezing they droop; well below it they roll shut.
Needle Ice
Needle ice grows out of saturated ground on cold, clear nights — water wicking up through soil and freezing into ribbed columns that lift crumbs of earth as they go. It forms in a few hours and collapses with the first sun. Anyone out early on a January morning can find it along the cut banks; by ten o'clock it is mud again.
Woodland Orchid
Two tall flowering spikes of a woodland orchid rise from a mulched garden bed, each lined with small green-and-pink blooms above broad, ribbed leaves, with ferns behind.
Inchworm on the Move
A green inchworm caterpillar grips the edge of a glossy leaf, its body curved into an S as it inches forward, foliage blurred behind.
Red Mushroom on the Forest Floor
A small mushroom with a bright red cap and pale stalk emerges from a bed of fallen pine needles and twigs on the shaded forest floor.
South Gateway
Purple Pitcher Plant
Purple pitcher plant sends up its nodding burgundy flowers on tall curved stalks, held well above the traps below so pollinators don't blunder into the wrong part of the plant. The pitchers themselves — veined, water-filled, lying open at the base — do the feeding. In the nutrient-poor bog soils where this species grows, insects supply what the ground cannot.
Fire Pink and Red Columbine
Fire pink and red columbine crowd a lichen-crusted stone wall in the gardens, two of the southern Appalachians' most dependable hummingbird flowers blooming within inches of one another. Fire pink holds its narrow scarlet petals open and flat; columbine's spurred lanterns nod above on wiry stems. Between them they keep the wall in color from April into June.
The Gardens Path in Summer
A curving stone path winds past a wildflower border of pink coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, and lavender asters, with an interpretive sign for the Highlands Botanical Gardens set among the greenery.
Asters Along the Garden Path
Lavender-blue asters bloom in the foreground of a wildflower border beside a cobbled path, with coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, and an interpretive sign behind.
Nothing photographed on the route this month. Try another month, or another photographer.
The year, seen whole
Every identified plant on record as one thread across twelve months, ordered by when it opens. Solid where it has been photographed here, pale where it is on record but nobody has caught it yet. The scene photographs along the walk are not in here — a bird's nest or a morning fog is a moment, not a season. Click any thread to jump the walk to that month.
Photographed On record, not yet photographed
Everything on record
The reference layer beneath the photographs — every plant known to flower here, month by month, whether or not anyone has photographed it yet. Not affected by the filters above.
Highlands Botanical Gardens
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