Some trees that might be difficult to locate during the spring through fall foliage season become more apparent in winter. This is the instance with sweetgum, which holds its leaves into early winter after most other deciduous trees have shed theirs. Into mid-December, the lovely reds, pinks, and clear yellows that signal the species stand out alongside roadways and on adjacent slopes. A drive on Western North Carolina’s highways at this time will turn up more sweetgum locations than one could ever detect during the rest of the year.

The fall wildflower season has arrived. Along roadsides and woodland edges some of our more robust native plants are now coming into full bloom. By “robust” I mean high growing and stout. These would include wild lettuce, common mullein, Joe Pye weed, green-headed coneflower, bull thistle, various species of woodland sunflowers, crown beard, boneset, white snakeroot, New York ironweed, cardinal flower, and others.

When I was growing up in the tobacco-farming portion of the southern Virginia piedmont, there were many haunted outbuildings throughout the region. My friends and I knew they were haunted because we would nightly, from early spring into early fall, hear ungodly shrieks and hisses emanating from them. My Uncle Will smoked his pipe and told us stories about the “monkey demons in the rafters.”

I recently received an email from a reader who asked, “Could you write about the sweet bubby bush? That’s the only name I know it by. Old plant, my mom loves it. I’d like to plant one. Haven’t seen it in a long time.”

It’s mid-September ... late summer is sliding toward early autumn. The end of summer officially arrives with the autumnal equinox of Sept. 23, when the sun crosses the celestial equator going north to south.

One senses this transition in the cool mist-shrouded mornings as well as by the brown-splotched and red-tinged leaves of the buckeye trees. Communal groups of swallows will soon be gathering on wires and branches prior to their annual southerly migration. Before long, monarch butterflies will be skipping with ease along the Appalachian chain headed for their ancestral wintering grounds in Mexico.

The walnut trees along the creek where we live are exhibiting a bumper crop this year. At night we are starting to hear their fruits dropping with heavy thuds on the ground or like depth charges into the water. Hopefully, one of them won’t conk me on the head when I’m working in the yard.

No late summer wildflower is more widely recognized than evening primrose. The four broad yellow petals that open in the evening and often linger into mid-morning on overcast days are a dead giveaway. If you’re looking for the plant, you won’t have to venture any farther than the first disturbed area in your neighborhood.

I sometimes have occasion to drive Interstate 81 up the Great Valley of Tennessee and Virginia to Washington, D.C. As soon as I pass out of Western North Carolina into the terrain north of Knoxville, the dominant tree along the roadside becomes red cedar. Spread throughout abandoned fields and clinging to the narrow ledges of rock outcrops, they flicker like green torches for hundreds of miles. I can never get enough of limestone country or the stands of red cedar that flourish there. And I never cease to wonder at the variety of shapes the tree can display within a short distance.

When a street was being cut in front of the new county administration building here in Bryson City back in the 1980s, a large foreign-looking tree could well have been felled in the name of progress. But resident R.P. Jenkins convinced authorities to pave a sidewalk around the tree so that it still stands at the corner of Mitchell and Everett streets as a representative of what has been rightfully called “a living fossil.”

Sometimes it’s difficult to draw the line between the natural and cultivated plant worlds. As cultivated plants escape they often establish themselves as part of our regional flora. My wife, Elizabeth, and I are particularly fond of those old-fashioned garden flowers that persist about abandoned homesteads. Sometimes the only evidence of former habitation will be the mute testimony offered by the gray foundation stones of the cabin and a scattered array of old-fashioned garden flowers.