Join John DeMary, well-known local naturalist and retired teacher, on a Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy field trip to explore Balls Bluff Battlefield Regional Park, a beautiful, wooded riverside park, for the early spring wildflowers that enrich the Potomac River Valley. We will also watch for early migrating birds. If you own binoculars, please bring them. Questions: […]

Vol. 18 Issue 1, Spring 2013 by John DeMary When European settlers sailed into the Chesapeake Bay they found a landscape dominated by dense forest and inhabited by a variety of native people. The interior forest seemed dark, dangerous and forbidding to the new arrivals, when actually it was a treasure chest of plants that […]

We had a fun outing last Saturday with John DeMary leading our group at Balls Bluff Park in Leesburg. While many of the wildflowers typically in bloom this time of year had already put on their show, there were still a number of great wildflowers to enjoy and we identified and talked about more than […]

  As we get out into our gardens this spring, we have a nice opportunity to do some native plantings. Native bees are one of our most important pollinators and they’re really incredible to watch. As you start observing them you’ll also start to recognize different species that we have here in Loudoun – there […]

Here in the middle of February, whether it be a warm winter day or snow on the ground, the Skunk Cabbage is emerging as one of our first signs of Spring. Skunk Cabbage is an interesting plant in that it can generate heat and maintain temperatures that are as much as 86 degrees higher than […]

Fall is an ideal time to get some seeds and put them out into your garden area.  Through the winter cold, the seeds will go through the process they need in order to start up in spring time and be beautiful just in time for our pollinators and Monarch butterflies in spring. By planting a […]

It’s cold, quiet, a few birds are singing but the woods and fields are pretty silent. Colors of spring and summer have gone dormant and the earth seems to be at rest. Winter, the time of rejuvenation, the growing of roots rather than leaves. Stan Shetler wrote a great article on Plant Life in the […]

By all accounts, the tree planting along the Town Branch stream on Saturday was a great success!  Gem Bingol from Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC) kicked off the event with an overview of the project, talking about the stream and how the riparian buffer will help improve water quality and describing the task that we would […]

Sixteen people joined us for our walk yesterday morning with John DeMary at Balls Bluff in Leesburg. John started out by making sure we all had the Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide and doing a practice run of “keying” a wildflower plant while we assembled in the parking area.  It was a nice refresher on how to use […]

A fellow nature lover, Cheryl, just over the mountain in West Virginia, wrote this lovely piece on going for a walk in the woods. With spring at our heels, I thought it would be nice to share her writing and thoughts: This year I have begun to think about what I want to do on […]