I have gone on some interesting trips with Paul and Brad. Last year we found the headwaters of the Chattahoochee River, not far off of the Appalachian Trail in north Georgia. This year Paul suggested we go see a rare flower called an Oconee Bell. This flower only blooms for a few weeks and only lives in a few counties in South Carolina, including Oconee County. There is a state park there called Devils Fork State Park on Lake Jocassee a couple of hours northeast of Atlanta that has a 1-mile loop trail that passes by some areas along creeks where Oconee Bells grow. We found a few at one end of the trail, and then continued through some woods towards the other end of the trail where there were even more. At the beginning the creek was kind of bizarre since it would completely disappear into the ground and then re-emerge 50 or 100 feet down the creek bed.
The flowers themselves are small and the plant grows pretty low, usually along creek banks. There is a neat story about it, first discovered by a French botanist who returned preserved samples of it to Paris around 1790. Then in 1839, an Americana botanist visiting Paris found the samples and decided to look for the plant when he got back to the United States. That botanist, Asa Gray, continued the search periodically for years before someone sent him a sample they had found in the 1870’s. He was finally able to go find the plant in the wild, which he named Shortia galacifolia, after another American botanist, Charles Wilkins Short. There was a stamp honoring Asa Gray a few years ago, which included the Oconee bell:
After marveling at the rare beauty of the Oconee bells we had lunch in Walhalla, South Carolina, then stopped by an old truss bridge over the Tugaloo River on the South Carolina and Georgia border, passing through Cornelia, Georgia in order to take in its famed Big Red Apple.
