More spring flowers!

These are some pictures from another hike my sister Joanne and I took last week, on April 18, at Champ County Park in north Florissant, off Old Halls Ferry Road. You drive through typical suburban streets, and then all of a sudden the street continues through some trees and you get to a park. There's a gravel parking lot with an open grassy area off to one side - but if you go the other way you find yourself walking through the forest, immersed in a natural setting that seems to have been hidden away from the miles of neighborhoods you just drove through to get there. It's a well-kept secret, but one worth sharing.

We saw some of the same flowers we saw at St. Francois State Park the week before, but some new ones as well.

Right at the edge of the forest where we had parked, we could see this tree blooming. It was small, an understory tree... Sassafras! We could even spot a few leaves with the classic "mitten" shape - and when we scratched at that bark, the unmistakable spicy aroma provided definite confirmation.

Almost as soon as we set out on the trail, we found ourselves to be surrounded by blooming pawpaw trees. Unlike the few green blossoms we had seen at St. Francois, these were in full bloom, their deep red clusters filling the view overhead.

This is another understory tree, but finding anything low enough to get a clearer picture of proved tricky!

A little blurry, but it shows the side view of the flower.

We started spotting mayapples right away, too. We'd seen a few along the road at St. Francois, but none along the trail, and the ones we saw were still small. These had bigger leaves, and a lot of them had the double leaf that meant there would be a flower underneath!

Life size.

No bluebells here, but there were lots of deep purple larkspurs. I'm just amazed this turned out so well, because my camera usually cannot process these bright shades of purple and blue in flowers.

We almost missed these, but there was one lone blossom left on what had been a string of them... Dutchman's Breeches! Doesn't it look like a tiny pair of pants stretched out to dry? Here's what the full flower looks like.

Lots and lots of trilliums. Spring beauties, too.

Fiddlehead! The twisty, snail-looking end of a fern that is still curled up before opening up all the way. Actually, half-uncurled like this, it almost looks like the tip of some monstrous tentacle...

A look ahead on the trail.

Purple!!!

Wild geraniums started showing up a lot, too. Some were a paler pink than this.

Jack-in-the-Pulpit! (I have a cousin named Jack who is a preacher, so this is funnier to say than it used to be...) The little tube with a round rod sticking up, and a little canopy roof over the top. These are harder to spot because they are one of those rare green flowers - there is a touch of red on the stems but for the most part this really blends in with the rest of the forest floor.

Another double-leaved, blooming mayapple!

Trillium, with ferns in the background. Side view...

...and aerial view.

This stuff is fun. It's called bedstraw. I'm not sure why, because it wouldn't be much fun to lie in - it's got teeny tiny prickles all along the stems and leaves. Which means if you pick a bit of it and toss it at someone, it's going to stick to their clothes! Joanne stuck this bit back on me after I stuck it on her first - but she did take a nice picture that shows the prickles, so it worked out.

Virginia creeper vine. Not a flower, but the new leaves do provide a nice bit of color. This vine is not messing around - it's hanging on tight here!

Along with the other flowers I've already mentioned, we were seeing plenty of violets - including yellow ones! - and spring beauties.

More pawpaw flowers standing out against the sky.

Here's some unplucked bedstraw.

By now we had climbed down a hill, crossed a creek, and then gradually climbed up and around the next hill. This brought us to a grove of sugar maple trees, which had a lot less understory growth - very few bushes or small trees. Presumably because the big trees have such dense shade when their leaves are out.

See? Sugar maple tree!

A lot of ferns, but not many bushes along here.

Looking back up the hill afterward, there's a very clear line where the bushes just stop.

Bellwort! We hadn't seen any along the trail until now.

We followed the trail along a high bank above the creek. We were starting to see a lot of dogwood trees blooming out in the woods. White clouds floating in the forest.

A log with a line of shelf fungi growing out of it.

What a lovely clump of Jack-in-the-Pulpit!

Side view.

We saw just a few of these - goldenseal.

This was actually not in my flower book! Very pretty, though.

I realized I'd taken close-ups of the mayapples, but not shown what they look like en masse.

Mushrooms! Just waiting for a little gnome to come out and start drumming...

We'd been seeing sweet william all along the way, but this clump was particularly lovely.

We came back to the creek (the trail loops around to where it started) and I noticed tracks in the mud down below! I'm pretty sure these are raccoon tracks - and this is the sort of place you'd expect to find a raccoon.

We got back to the parking lot and I had to walk over to check out a tree we had seen while driving in. We weren't sure what it was, but when I got home and checked the book, our first guess proved to be correct - hawthorn. A member of the apple-and-rose family, and a very pretty tree when in bloom!

This is a short trail, just under a mile, and it takes a little while to get to through the miles of suburbia, but it is a wonderful spot to get out in the woods, get away from it all and get your "nature fix"!

Wildflower list:

sassafras tree
pawpaw tree
redbud tree
dogwood tree
sweet william
mayapple
larkspur
trillium
spring beauty
wild geranium
jack-in-the-pulpit
buttercup
purple violet
yellow violet
goldenseal
hawthorn tree
mystery flower
fiddlehead fern (not a flower, but still!)
red virginia creeper leaves (it was colorful!)
mushrooms (okay, this is pushing it...)