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May 2025

Curtis’s puffballs often grow in small clusters, typically in grassy, open areas.

June’s Wild Edible: Curtis’s Puffball

On our land in Botetourt County, Virginia, this round, white mushroom typically begins appearing in late June and continues to do so through the rest of the summer.
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May’s Mountain Wildflower: Smooth Solomon’s Seal

Because these plants cannot tolerate direct sunlight, you will not encounter the Solomon’s seals until the tree canopy has begun to leaf out.
White jelly snow fungus growing in the author’s Botetourt County, Virginia woodlot.

May’s Wild Edible: White Jelly Snow Fungus

“Pass the fungus,” is not common dinnertime conversation in the Blue Ridge Mountains region, but that’s because folks perhaps have not heard of the white jelly snow fungus.
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Gifts of the Land: Boys a-Berrying in Botetourt

The simple act of berry picking can embody many other pieces of the outdoors.
Photo is from Emma Gatewood’s second AT hike, in 1957. She is at Lonesome Lake, New Hampshire.

Emma Gatewood’s Walk

Seventy years ago this May, a 67-year-old woman set out from the Georgia mountains in tennis shoes with the goal to walk until she got to Maine, something no other woman had done.
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Behind Blue Ridge Country

Even More Sweet Virginia Breezes

Casually cruising to Claytor Lake in southwest Virginia, I felt like I had come home – back to where it

April 12, 2018

CALENDAR OF EVENTS