Now that summer is here, you may be contemplating a cool walk in the forest. Shaded trails through Battle Park and along Bolin Creek do indeed beckon. But if you are looking for the blooms of midsummer and other botanical treats, you may want to meander through a meadow instead.

By this time of year, most plants that bloom in our deciduous forests have already done so, and life in the shade has settled into a rhythm based on low light levels and high humidity. Late June is a good time to visit our roadsides and abandoned farm fields.

Chapel Hill offers several opportunities for meadow walking, and some of the best are in the Mason Farm Biological Reserve -- the patchwork of forest and abandoned farmland bordered by the Finley Golf Course and Morgan Creek and managed by the N.C. Botanical Garden.

In pre-settlement Piedmont North Carolina, natural meadows may have been limited to wet flat areas near creeks and beaver impoundments and some drier "Piedmont prairies" on special rock types. But today at the Mason Farm Reserve, botanical garden staff use controlled burning and mowing to keep the former agricultural fields in an early successional state -- that is, as meadows. The goal is to eventually eliminate the non-native grasses, lespedeza, and other exotic species once planted as cover crops, and to encourage our diverse and highly interesting native flora to take hold.

Picture a thigh-high, green to rusty sward of grasses interspersed with the small purple helmet-like flowers of skullcap (Scutellaria), brilliant-yellow splashes of lingering sundrops (Oenothera), pure white penstemons and daisy fleabanes (Erigeron), purple wild petunias (Ruellia), and here and there, rising above it all, the white flat-topped clusters of dogbane (Apocynum), pink globular flower clusters on thick stalks of common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), and the roadside favorite -- flashy orange butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa). As you "swish" your way through a meadow, you may notice a faint smell of mint essence coming from the narrow-leaf mountain mint (Pycnanthemum tenuifolium).

Don't dismiss the scene before you as just a bunch of grass with a wildflower or two. In fact, if you like a challenge, see whether you can distinguish between grasses, sedges and rushes. The sedges and rushes have already set seed, and the seed heads of sedges in particular come in a variety of interesting forms -- many looking like short, spiky caterpillars on slender stems.

There is a grass that makes me think of a bottle brush (Elymus hystrix), and another whose narrow, long fingerlike seed stalks remind me of corn. In fact, gamma grass (Tripsacum dactyloides) is the closest thing we have to corn in our native flora. It is so curiously attractive when in bloom -- yellow to orange anthers dangling from upper reaches of the arching "fingers" and purple pistils emerging from below -- that interest in this native grass as a garden ornamental is growing.

Visit a meadow this summer and discover the variety and charm of our grasses, sedges, rushes, and wildflowers. To visit Mason Farm Biological Reserve, you must obtain a permit from the botanical garden.

When you do, please restrict your visit to the loop road trail, which gives you a very complete view of the meadows and the Big Oak Woods. See ncbg.unc.edu/pages/41 or call 962-0522.