Graceful Fiddleheads © B E Kazmarski
The Panhandle Trail is usually dry enough for a bike ride by mid-April, but sometimes after a rain it’s a little sloppy. A couple of years ago when I arrived with my bike to find a slightly sloppy trail and a light drizzle I decided instead to take a walk along the Nature Trails with my camera.
I’m documenting walks along local trails to capture the flora you’d see along the trails as you walked, and I’m on Panhandle most often. I’m familiar enough to know what blooms when, since photographing wildflowers has been one of my projects from before my digital camera using just natural light and my favorite lens setup so that I can focus on just one petal of a flower if I want, leaving the rest to blur into the background in a swirl of color and shape. I’ve got loads of shots like this on film, but now I’m using that same lens setup on my digital SLR.
One of the differences with this photo shoot is they are in sequence, so if you walked along the trail, among other wildflowers, you’d see these flowers in about this order.
These images are provided for familiarity rather than strict scientific identification; I am not a scientist, and my goal is first to take good photographs, then to give people a general appreciation of the beauty of their local wildflowers. The names are accurate, but I’ll keep to the most common name to make it easier for you to find these in guidebooks and pursue more information. Just enjoy looking at them!
Click this link to get to the page to see the flash slideshow; when the slideshow comes up, hold your mouse over the image to see the name of the flower at the top of the image:Panhandle Nature Walk, Mid-May 2009
You can also see other slideshows of Panhandle and other area trails:
Panhandle Trail, McDonald to Walker’s Mill, Mid-June 2009
These wildflowers are right along the trail—I bicycled out to McDonald to scope out what was blooming, then pretty much walked my bicycle back, taking photos along the way.
May and June Wildflowers of the Lower Chartiers Watershed
Some wildflowers you’ll be sure to see along Panhandle and in other areas.
Wildflowers of a Summer Evening, July 2009
Wildflowers at Kane’s Woods in Scott Township.
These photos were taken and organized into slideshows by Bernadette E. Kazmarski and posted on this blog by the artist. No photos or text may be used without written permission of the artist, but please contact me if you are interested. If you take photos along the Panhandle Trail and would like to write up something and send some photos, please comment on this post and I’ll be in touch.