Showing posts with label wildflower. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wildflower. Show all posts

Sunday, January 16, 2022

Let Me Call You Sweetheart ...

 

… “Let me call you “sweetheart,” I’m in love with you

Let me hear you whisper that you love me too

Keep the love-light glowing in your eyes so true

Let me call you “sweetheart,” I’m in love with you …”

      ~ “Let Me Call You Sweetheart”

    ~ popular song published in 1910

  ~ music by Leo Friedman & lyrics by Beth Slater Whitson

    ~recorded by artists including Bing Crosby, The Mills Brothers, Pat Boone, Patti Page, Fats Domino & Slim Whitman

Bleeding hearts bring thoughts of love in bloom on a mid-April evening in spring along the Ironton Rail Trail, which loops more than nine miles through Whitehall Township, the Borough of Coplay and North Whitehall Township, Pennsylvania.

Bleeding hearts are shade-loving woodland plants that bloom in the cool of spring. Although they stay in bloom for several weeks, the plants often become ephemeral, disappearing for the rest of the summer if exposed to too much sun or heat. The roots are still alive, though, and the plant will regrow in the fall or the following spring. The fringed-leaf varieties of bleeding heart repeat-bloom throughout the summer.

 

The Ironton Railroad was a shortline railroad in Lehigh County. Originally built in 1861 to haul iron ore and limestone to blast furnaces along the Lehigh River, traffic later shifted to carrying Portland Cement when local iron mining declined in the early 20th century. Much of the railroad had already been abandoned when it became part of Conrail in 1976, and the last of its trackage was removed in 1984.

 

In 1996, Whitehall Township purchased 9.2 miles of the right-of-way from Conrail, transforming it into the Ironton Rail Trail.





 


 


 


 


Monday, August 28, 2017

An Early Fall ...



“And all at once, summer collapsed into fall.”
                                   ~ Oscar Wilde
                                          ~ 1854-1900
Beautiful goldenrod sways in the gentle late August breeze, a sure sign of an early fall along the Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor (D&L Trail) at Lehigh Gap on a waning summer afternoon.

In the shadow of the Kittatinny Ridge, also called Blue Mountain, the Lehigh Gap in Slatington, Pennsylvania, is a crossroads where the Lehigh Gap Nature Center’s trails connect two historic trails – the Appalachian Trail and the D&L Trail. 

The Appalachian Trail, a foot path, follows the ridge on both sides of the Lehigh Gap, running 1,245 miles south to Georgia and 930 miles north to Maine. Running from Wilkes-Barre to Bristol, the D&L Trail passes through the Lehigh and Delaware rivers and their canals in Pennsylvania.

Goldenrod is the state flower of Kentucky (adopted 1926) and Nebraska (adopted 1895) and was recently named the state wildflower of South Carolina.