Phill Gibson

Back when I was a young boy, starting about age 10 or so, I was very interested in nature – frogs, turtles, stars, weather, etc., etc.

I was also interested in odd sorts of plants that grew out in the humid woods of ecologically-rich Alabama. I had a Golden Nature Guide edited by Dr. Herbert S. Zim titled Non-Flowering Plants. Actually, I had TONS of his books, and treasured each one of them. His book on non-flowering plants sparked my interest in these unusual plants that were available just for the looking beyond our backyard.

It’s been a fairly wet fall here, so these non-flowering plants have been in abundance. I never got proficient enough to identify these plants very well, unlike my brother, who made a career out of knowing what plant is what. Perhaps that’s why – all I had to do was ask him anything botanical and he immediately could tell me the name, the Latin name and whatever growing requirements it had – so why bother with learning them myself! Of course, that’s not entirely true, as some plants have rubbed off on me, but not as much as I would have liked.

So here in a series of maybe four or five blogs are some of these recent non-flowering plants I’ve seen this fall. They are identified only to a basic level, if at all. Hope you enjoy them for the same primitive wildness they evoke in me!