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I spent the weekend in Gatlinburg quietly editing my new book. The only thing more tedious than editing a manuscript is writing it in the first place. Word. Phrase. Sentence. Paragraph. Chapter. On and on and on, it's endless. After hours of staring at a computer screen, bleary-eyed and stiff-backed, I needed a break.
We decided on a road trip to the mountains. I’m working on completing my collection of “orange-flower” photos. Why? It’s such a finite set; there are very few of them. For some reason, in the floral world, nature avoids the color orange. On this day, I wanted to locate the native orange lily. (I’ve already posted on two non-native imports:
tiger lily and
orange daylily.) Although it looks something like a tiger lily, the
Turk's cap lily has been here all along. It predates even my hillbilly ancestry.
Years ago, Karen Sue worked at LeConte Lodge and knew that the Turk’s cap blooms in the high elevations of the national park in mid-summer, so off we went to the top of Old Smoky. We were quickly rewarded.
The petals of this statuesque wildflower curve sharply backward on themselves. This once gave someone the impression of the caps worn historically by the Turks, hence the name.
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