Fall Colors Begin to Fade
November 5, 2011
The brilliant colors of October foliage were beginning to wane two weeks ago. Walking to Schoepfle Garden October 22 I passed the neighbor’s leaf display that I’d passed 13 days earlier. Green had become gold and gold brown, but leaves were abundant there, and the overall effect was still quite brilliant. (You can compare the first photo in this post to the first photo in the post of October 12; some of the same trees are in both shots.) Down near the river, however, fall had made greater inroads. The shadow on the Birmingham Mills ruins foretells what is to come for almost all the deciduous trees in the northern climates this winter. (Young northern beeches and oaks tend to hold onto their old leaves until pushed out by the new ones in the spring. To learn why, go to http://northernwoodlands.org/articles/article/why-do-some-leaves-persist-on-beech-and-oak-trees-well-into-winter.) Meanwhile, some green persisted in some of the smaller plants. For years I wondered how or why insects chewed holes into leaves in a trail like the ones shown in the last photograph in this post. Finally, it hit me: They don’t chew a trail of holes; they chew a straight path through an unfurled leaf that, when it opens, looks like this.
Romancing Reality 