Fall Part I

We are having a fair to middling fall here, in terms of color. Sandy's outlying winds stripped off leaves that had a tenuous hold and so half the leaves are gone without having had the chance to turn. It's been a few years since we had a truly dazzling fall.

Top: just inside the woods next to the open space between the old and current house sites.
Bottom left, sassafras. Bottom right, coastal pepperbush.

The total effect is one of muted warm colors. There is still a lot of green.

Sensitive fern on the forest floor.

I'm not complaining about not having the most spectacular fall ever though. Sandy went around us, only giving us a couple of gray windy rains and a little rain, and the ratio of comfortable golden days to gray wintry days has been at least 4:1. There is still a lot of beauty in the landscape. The overall effect is of warm muted color. Alternating with the brown twigs of spent Bidens are the bright yellow-green leaves of aging Seashore Mallow and purple berries and asters, punctuated by splashes of brilliance: a young pawpaw that surprised us this year by turning a vivid yellow, the witch hazel painted with orange and red, an old gold Amsonia, a bright orange young Musclewood, and blueberries that have turned crimson.

South of the big perennial bed, near the ditch, is an area that is still semi-wild. I've planted a few divisions of willowleaf aster and a number of woody plants here ~ a sweetbay grown from seed, a baby wild blueberry transplanted from our woods, a swamp cyrilla grown from seed, and a half a dozen Antique Rose Emporium swamp roses grown from cuttings ~ but those plantings are young and relatively small still.

Swamp sunflowers and Encore azaleas.

I suppose the Bidens may look like a mess, but pictures don't capture the sweet cotton candy fragrance from the drying stems on warm sunny days, or the small twittering flocks of goldfinches, chipping sparrows and field sparrows that feed on the seeds.

The neighbor's miniature horses.

Seedheads of Sugarcane Plumegrass.

The pawpaw turned a rich shade of orange/brown after the first frost. As you can guess,
this area is not part of the garden, but a wild area that's mowed with the tractor once a year.

Sometimes the tangles outside of the garden bug me, but the wildlife loves them. In summer the Indigo Buntings sing above the brambles and the bobwhite quail flutter and glide from hedgerow to hedgerow. The turkey hen and her babies must have moved on to another area of their territory, as I haven't seen them for a few weeks, but just the other day I saw a covey of quail fly across the old house site, numbering at least 15 if not more than 20.