A Natural Place For Therapy
(Today’s post describes our visit to Colt Creek State Park in central Florida on September 26, 2025. Gini had knee replacement surgery 30 days prior. I will have four more sessions to complete 36 visits to the clinic for cardiac rehabilitation. Our last outing in Nature was August 15. Kudos to those who waded through all three blog parts!)
(Click on images to enlarge, click again to zoom.)
Friday. Late afternoon. No other visitors to the park were visible. Just past the entrance we were greeted by a lovely group of Seven Sisters all dressed in white. The Red-shouldered Hawk was on his pine branch perch at the first bend in the road. A patch of Clustered Bushmint was attracting all sorts of nectar-lovers. We parked at the first trailhead with a specific purpose in mind.
Gini was not quite ready to test her brand new knee on the uneven trail so she volunteered to guard the vehicle while she caught up on her latest novel. I went. I saw. I photographed. Two types of flowers, both bearing the common name of “lily”, but one from the Iris family and the other actually from the Lily family. Mission accomplished. Now what?
Oh, there is a whole park we haven’t yet wandered around in and there are still a couple of hours of daylight left. Lake, creek, forest, fields, bugs, blooms, birds. We took it all in with each breath. Who knew when we would be able to return?
Red-shouldered Hawks are quite common throughout Florida. This handsome adult launched from a small pine tree with its eye on early supper.
One of our more abundant, and colorful, butterflies is the bright orange Gulf Fritillary (Dione incarnata).
Nearly endemic to Florida, Four-petal St. Johnswort (Hypericum tetrapetalum) blooms profusely in spring and summer but, as we discovered, doesn’t mind showing off even in late September.
A New Bug! From all our research and queries, we are pretty sure this big specimen is in the Spider Wasp Family (poss. Anoplius semicinctus). Here, it’s on Clustered Bushmint (Hyptis alata).
Stop! Wild Turkey crossing. (We watched as these two joined a group of 18 nearby.)
A New Bloom! We have searched for this one for a long time and finally found them today. Rayless Sunflower (Helianthus radula) is quite unique and very different from its cousins with all those yellow petals.
Another species nearly endemic to Florida, Chapman’s Goldenrod (Solidago chapmanii) typically is one of the earliest blooming goldenrods in Florida. This one hung around just for us.
One of our first fall migrants made an appearance. This Eastern Phoebe is quite polite as she constantly yells her name for us: “Pheeee-Beeee“!
On my short walk when we first arrived at the park, I found the two lilies I had hoped to see. The first, Pine lily (Lilium catesbaei), is also known as Catesby’s lily, Leopard lily, Tiger lily or Southern-red lily. It is the largest lily found in North America.
The other “lily”, in the Iris family, is a small delicate flower called Celestial Lily (Nemastylis floridana). It is found only in Florida and it only blooms in the late afternoon.
We had a wonderful therapy session in one of our favorite Natural Places today. Unsure of what the coming months would have in store for us, we were grateful for the opportunity to see so much in such a short span of time.
Enjoy your search for a natural place and come back for a visit!
Our Natural Places 
That’s an excellent action picture of the hawk flying.
I like how you refer to your outing in nature as a therapy session. As the word session means literally ‘a sitting,’ Gini had a therapy session too, and a novel one at that. Or, as Milton didn’t quite say: They also serve who only sit and wait.
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