More than 20 years ago I stepped onto Couchville Cedar Barrens and saw the Tennessee Coneflower for the first time. Geoff Roach, who at that time worked for The Tennessee Chapter of The Nature Conservancy, led me on the short hike. I was awestruck!! There were hundreds of these endangered flowers growing in one location!! I photographed them everyday for nearly a month. in 1999 one of the images was chosen as the cover of the Bell South Telephone book for the state. Now the flower has been delisted. There are a lot fewer flowers now than there used to be.

I still return at least once a year to photograph the glades and the flowers. Here is the phone book cover and a few images that I made on the 8th of June 2016.