when I was driving...

...across south Georgia yesterday and it finally got light enough to see the landscape, it was a really pleasant day. A bit cool and overcast, but warmer than earlier in the week. Tooling along, listening to public radio, feeling in touch with the world, observing nature and the plant life along the highways of the flatlands was a nice trip. I'm very thankful for my handy little GPS a friend gave me a couple of years ago. I had no idea where I was in the dark, just hoping and believing that voice in the little device would not lead me astray. This is probably the first time I have completely depended on electronics to guide me, map lover that I am. Especially when I got to Waycross, and had to take a route different from the path I've taken for decades when heading due east for the coast (which I could do without much thought at all.) Headed northeast towards Savannah, often out in the woods, feeling well beyond civilization.

Lots of very familiar plants filling the landscape after the sun started coming up: scraggly volunteering slash pines coming up where acres had been bush-hogged clear. Along with oaks, sweet gums and other trees often considered trash to timber buyers. Tough hardy palmetto shrubs expanding into the right of way from the edge of the woods, a generally useless plant that is virtually impossible to dig up, bulldoze over or destroy. Clumps of broom sedge and wiregrass sprouting in land so sandy, lacking in nutrition that nothing else will grow. Low swampy places full of water from recent rains and swamp myrtle, which must be one of the hardiest shrubs ever to so placidly grow in extreme condtions of drought and flood.  As the sky lightened, and I could see more of the world, I noticed places that the land had been cleared,with long leaf pine seedlings planted, to start their years of growth before being harvested as a crop for lumber yards.

And vine-ing around the trees, when you would not expect anything at all to be blooming here in early January: yellow Carolina jasmine. Always makes me think of my dad, who thought it was one of the earliest signs of the Promise of Spring. It will grow as high as it can into the tops of trees, more noticeable in the winter when the deciduous trees are bare. Twining up the trunks and into the highest twigs, with bright yellow little trumpet shaped blooms opening to remind us that it won't be this dark and dismal forever. I've also noticed some little heads of hyacinths peeping up in several places in my yard, where bulbs have been planted, waiting for rains and sunshine to wake them up.