Governor Dodge State Park

Another early-summer field trip brought me for the first time to Governor Dodge State Park. I'm embarrassed to admit it's taken me this long to get out there. It's a beautiful park and only about an hour's drive from Madison. Not only were there beautiful ferns and flowers, but also gorgeous sandstone rock formations (some of them complete with Dryopteris):

As a result of all these rocks, the soils in this part of Wisconsin are often very sandy, and we found a lot of Dryopteris intermedia and D. carthusiana (pictured just below). That makes it a great place to photograph this mother-and-daughter pair together for easier comparison (second photo below; D. intermedia on the left and D. carthusiana on the right).

Another beautiful fern find was Woodsia ilvensis, and there were also some lovely flowers in bloom as well, including the Stellaria and Lupinus also pictured below. My next couple blog posts will be about specific interesting ferns that we found in Governor Dodge.