A photo of a dimpled trout lily set me on a path. For years, I’ve been seeing photos of rare plants at the Angus Gholson Nature Park in Chattahoochee, and I’d been wanting to wander through it with a camera. And now, here was a photo of a spring ephemeral in my feed, one of the first wildflowers to bloom in our area. A rare plant for our area, too. It occurred to me- why not make my first trip to the park now, and then return every few weeks as new flowers bloomed?
Gholson Nature Park is located in Chattahoochee, Florida, not far from where I’ve embarked on several RiverTrek adventures down the Apalachicola River. Chattahoochee was the birthplace and home of the park’s namesake, Angus Gholson. Gholson was a forester who managed the Lake Seminole Preserve for the Army Corps of Engineers. He spent decades helping researchers study the plants of the area, and became a renowned botanist after his retirement.
Aside from his time serving during World War II and attending the University of Florida, Gholson lived his whole life in Chattahoochee, at the head of the Apalachicola. This is the upper edge of the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines region, a biodiversity hotspot with the highest diversity of tree species in North America. It’s also home to many rare and highly localized plant species. Not a bad place for a botanist to spend a life.
One reason for the high plant diversity is the area’s ravines. Gholson Park doesn’t have steephead ravines like Torreya State Park or the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve (ABRP). Instead of a steephead stream, it has a small, spring-fed creek flowing through it. We start by heading for the source of the stream.
February 5, 2025: the lay of the land, and the first trout lily blooms
I’m always down to explore a new place, and I don’t mind getting lost. I get lost often. Luckily, though, when I first arrive at Angus Gholson Nature Park, I’m greeted by a Bob Farley. Bob is one of the park’s stewards, a volunteer with the Magnolia Chapter of the Florida Native Plant Society. The Park is owned by the City of Chattahoochee, and maintained by the Magnolia Chapter. Bob lives nearby, and is here today to remove an invasive chinaberry tree. Invasive plants are a major problem, he tells me. Unlike Torreya or ABRP, this is a city park surrounded by neighborhoods. There are many vectors for invasives to enter the park.
Waving his hands over the large map by the parking area, he gives me a few highlights and recommendations. The most important piece of information is that some of the further off trails depicted in the map have not been passable since Hurricane Michael. He also notes that since Michael, the trout lily population has expanded, perhaps due to a more open canopy in parts. That’s one hypothesis, anyway.
The first highlight Bob shares is a little bit of Chattahoochee history, and so I’m off in search of ruins.
A Spring-Fed Swimming Pool Built by the CCC
In the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps built a bridge across the Apalachicola River. Part of that bridge remains near the current Highway 90 bridge.
To cool themselves off after hard days at work, they built a pool to capture the stream of a magnitude four spring in town. A small opening in a concrete wall around the pool allows the spring water to flow back into its run, a small creek that flows through the park and into an Apalachicola River floodplain forest. They may well have followed a trail from the bridge to the spring that was walkable before Hurricane Michael.
As you can see, the pool is not currently swimmable, and their ruins add ambience to the trail.
Here is a closer look at the small spring trickling out from limestone rocks.
To the left of the spring, a stone staircase leads up, but there is no trail to follow up there. After I spend a little time by the spring, I double back and follow the creek.
A narrow trail at Gholson Park
The trail follows a small, winding creek. It’s so small that I can’t always see it past the edge of the steep slope, in its creek bed. The slope, though, is the attraction. Years ago, the Florida Natural Areas Inventory reclassified the habitat description for slope forests. This description used to encompass all hardwood forests around ravines, pockets in the Florida landscape where we find plants common in the Appalachian mountains. Many of those plants migrated to our area during ice ages; when glaciers melted, they slowly migrated north, but populations remained behind in our area’s ravines.
A few years ago, FNAI changed the definition of a slope forest to include only those in the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Region. While we have similar forests in Tallahassee, only a slope forest will have Torreya trees and Florida yew trees. These are the two rarest trees in North America. Slope Forests are home to a host of rare plants and animals, and species that are otherwise only found in the Appalachians.
Look at this trail. You can barely see it in the photo. I love it. It’s narrow, and there are places where it’s hard to see where the trail leads. I get a sense that it was designed to disturb the ground as little as possible.
Trout lilies and trillium
It’s not hard to see why, when dimpled trout lily leaves grow from the edge of the creek up to trail edge, continuing above the trail. When I put my camera bag down to change lenses, I have to be careful to place it at the center of the trail to not disturb these state-endangered wildflowers.
Trout lilies have leafed out along a couple wide slopes, which should soon make for an impressive sight. I’ve seen a photo of a trout lily flower here, taken within the last few days. So I walk slowly, and I scan the ground. I do that anyway, if I’m walking somewhere with a camera.
Here’s a closer look at their mottled leaves. And here is a flower:
There are a handful in bloom on the slopes, giving us a preview of what is soon to come.
There are several trillium leaves among the trout lilies, and I finally find one in bloom right at the edge of the slope of the creek bed. Underwood’s trillium is the most common of our area trilliums, but this park also has the much rarer lanceleaf wakerobin. I don’t see any today, but it’s a goal to find it on my next visit.
Dimpled Trout lilies: an Appalachian wildflower in Florida
You can see how dimpled trout lilies are widespread in the Appalachian Mountains, and then less so in the southern half of Georgia. But then look at our area. If you zoom in, there are three major populations: at Torreya State Park, Angus Gholson Nature Park, and Wolf Creek Trout Lily Preserve in Whigham, Georgia. There are also a couple scattered around Lake Jackson in Tallahassee, which means keeping a closer eye on the ground in Klapp-Phipps Park.
There are a few plants here with a similar distribution, and I hope to photograph them all in my upcoming visits.
The trail devolves
Let me say again how much I love the minimalist trail here. At one point, I follow the trail away from the creek and almost lose it altogether, when I notice the orange flagging tape tied around trees. Where the trail is hardest to follow, they’ve marked trees more closely together.
When I reach a large pond next to a campground, I lose the trail. The park once connected to a trailhead at the Chattahoochee Boat Landing, where RiverTrek kicks off every year. That way has been cut off by Michael. On my way back, I see where the trail branches. Somewhere to explore another day, hopefully soon.
I take a different path back, crossing the creek on a couple of planks. There are also fully-built bridges here, but I like the feel of these. I wonder, are there Apalachicola dusky salamanders in this stream? There are many adventures ahead here, and I will keep adding them to this post. What will I see here by the end of the year, I wonder?
February 21, 2025: Lanceleaf wakerobin, crane-fly orchid, and more trout lilies
Today I return to look for species I know should be in bloom now, and to better familiarize myself with the trails. It’s the same with any place I visit regularly; I try to learn the loops, connections, landscape features, and where I might expect to see certain plants or critters. To help me with that last item, I consult a list of plant species in the park put together by the Florida Native Plant Society, Magnolia Chapter. It’s a large list, but they made it easy for me by marking the state or federally listed species, as well as the non-natives.
I made my own list from theirs. On it are the endangered and threatened species, the rare ones. I added these nineteen species to a spreadsheet, and looked up their bloom times. I familiarized myself with the handful that bloomed in February and March: these are my goal for the day.
Did I miss the peak trout lily bloom?
I follow Wolf Creek Trout Lily Preserve on social media, and have seen their slopes approach peak bloom this week. And that’s what I was hoping to see here. It dipped below freezing last night, and I wondered if that might affect them. If that was the case, I’d see dead flowers. I do see a few faded blooms, likely those that bloomed between my first outing and today.
I’ve also been told that their peak bloom time is between 1-4 pm. I arrive at noon, and it’s a cold day. Does temperature affect trout lily bloom times, I wonder? I will take a closer look on my way back.
Trout lilies blanket the slopes along a pair of creeks in the park, and while looking for their little yellow flowers, I see other wildflowers. Many more violets are in bloom today than were a couple weeks ago.
Many violet species have similar-looking flowers, and there are five species listed for this park. When identifying any closely related group of wildflowers, leaf shape is often more important than flowers.
There are plenty of trilliums in bloom as well, and I’ll share those photos in a moment. First, among the trout lily leaves, I find one of my target plants.
Crane-fly orchids emerge
Some people are plant nerds, and other people are data nerds. We live in an age where you can be both at once. Many of the listed plants in this park are widespread far north of Florida, but are rare here. When you look for information about these plants, sources often list common bloom times for northern states, or over the entire range of the plant. Ignore what calendars tell you when it comes to seasons; Florida is warmer than most states and flowers bloom here when other states have snow on the ground (let’s treat our heavy snow from our few weeks back as an anomaly – for now).
This is where I turn to citizen-science apps like iNaturalist or eBird. The data is collected by those of us who use the apps, but we also get to play with it. In iNaturalist, each species page has a graph showing when they have been observed throughout the year. You can localize that data to a state, county, or city. In Gadsden County, Florida, people have observed crane-fly orchids in February, March, and August. Clicking on some observations around the park, I see that it blooms in August, but we see leaves at this time of year.
I looked over photos of the leaves for this state-threatened plant, and have an image in my mind. I find them in one spot, around trout lily leaves:
This plant will be much showier in August.
The leaves are green with red highlights, a similar color scheme to other leaves I see low to the ground.
Sarsaparilla vine is common on ravine and creek slopes in Florida, along with partridgeberry (Mitchella ripens). These are common plants we find in areas that also contain less common plants. I’m always happy to see them along a trail.
Trail damage at Gholson Nature Park
I’ve been walking along the blue line in the middle of the yellow loop. This is a connecter trail bisecting the Gholson Loop, the lower part of which I hiked last time. Both of these run along creeks, and have slopes full of dimpled trout lilies.
When the connector reaches the Muscogee Trail (marked in orange), I stay on the lower track rather than head further upslope. The next time the trails splits in two on the map, further to the left, there’s really only one way to go.
On my first visit, Bob Farley mentioned hurricane damage making trails impassable. I take the only path available to me, and head north. This section of what they call the Fitness Trail runs through a low-lying, wet area. Here, I might find some of my target species for the day.
Continuing along the trail, I notice how many trees have been piled to the side. I wonder what kind of effort it took to keep this part of the trail clear. When I revisited Torreya State Park a year after Hurricane Michael, I learned how hard it could be to clean up areas with topography. Heavy machines can’t operate in dense slope forests; it takes people-power.
After a tree dies, fungi start to break down lignins in the plant’s cell walls, softening the wood. A place with this many downed trees must have some fantastic mushrooms during a warm, rainy, time of year.
If you read the February 5 entry, this is where the trail was hard to follow without frequent trail markers. I somehow missed all those downed trees last time, but that’s no surprise. I can get hyper-focused when scanning the ground for plants or insects. This time I poke around a little more, and while walking around a large puddle, I find another target.
Lanceleaf wakerobin: a Florida-endangered trillium
This wildflower is listed as endangered in Florida and Tennessee. It is smaller than the more common Underwood’s trillium, with narrower leaves. After seeing one, it was easier to spot more both near and off the trail.
This has been a good day. The more I roam this park, the more rare plants I see. There are still a couple of other targets left on my February list, but they both bloom into March. They may just be getting started.
One day a few years back, I went on the Timberlane Ravine Trail with the intention of photographing trillium. I saw so many leaf shapes, variations in brightness and color, that I thought I had photographed two or three different species. iNaturalist recommended Underwood’s trillium for them all, and the top trillium identifiers confirmed the picks. The flowers at Gholson Park aren’t so varied, but I was thinking about this day as I scanned the slopes for lanceleaf wakerobin.
I have to get a child to swim practice on time, back in Tallahassee, so I have to turn back. Will I see any trout lilies in full bloom today?
The answer is yes
There are a few more than there were a couple weeks ago, but not the slope full of yellow I see at Wolf Creek. Maybe the Gholson population has a later peak than the slopes just to the north of it, but that doesn’t sound right. In my searching, I find a few sources that say it takes up to seven years for a dimpled trout lily to bloom after it first sprouts. Bob Farley told me that trout lilies here have spread in the years after Michael, and the seven year anniversary of that storm is coming up in October. We might see many more blooms in the years to come.
And I hope to see many blooms of other sorts in the months to come. There is quite a lot of green coming up out of the ground here:
