Back in mid March here in central Florida we had all sorts of flowers and trees blooming everywhere (and we still do now, but a lot of them are different ones, now). The area where I live and work is pretty high and dry by Florida standards, but our county has other areas that are lower (some are even below sea level) and definitely more wet. Like the rest of the Deep South, we definitely have some swamps and of course, we have habitats between the swamp and the sandhills, too. One of my friends from work travels around this area a lot on weekends since she and her husband have a side business installing doors. She has been starting to take some photos of some of our wildlife and wildflowers, and has gotten pretty good. She shared these with me last month, and I wanted to share them with all of you.

These little beauties are atamasco lilies, also known as rain lilies, fairy lilies, or zephyr lilies. They are native to the east coast of the United States from Virginia south to Florida and as far west as Mississippi. They are definitely a moist habitat plant, which is why they don’t grow here in the sandhills. They prefer soil that stays consistently wet and is somewhat acidic (they love areas with leaf litter and leaf mold), so we often see them in wet fields, low lying wooded areas, and wet roadside ditches. They like plenty of direct sunlight, but they don’t like to get dried out. The plant leaves tend to be long and narrow and grow in a circular formation with a single stalk coming up and ending in a single flower. They can reproduce both via seeds and by root/bulb multiplication, so they tend to grow in small colonies.

I would like to thank Crystal Pruit for sharing these beautiful and interesting plants with me and giving me the opportunity to share them with you.