Fall, Part II

Hmmm, perhaps our fall color hasn't turned out to be so mediocre after all! Sandy did take away a lot of leaves, and at first most of the color we had was from a lone sassafras, a witch hazel, early-coloring wild blueberries, and wild sweet pepperbush that line the edge of the woods and the big ditch that runs behind the big perennial bed and beside the old house site. Last week I was thinking that I needed to add more things with fall color to the garden and maybe I'd been depending on the surrounding trees too much.

We have one good-sized sassafras on the farm, a wild one that grows near the edge of the
woods. It gets quite a bit of shade but still manages a beautiful shade of caramel gold each fall.

The coastal sweet pepperbush turned a rich yellow that lasted for 3 weeks. The leaves
are sensitive to frost and some years the show gets cut short, but not this year.

Sweet pepperbush and willowleaf aster 'Miss Bessie'. The
red shrub in the background is a blueberry starting to turn.

As I had hoped, the witch hazel has been reliably colorful every fall. It's a seedling of 'Jelena' (Hamamelis x intermedia), an orange-flowered hybrid of Japanese and Chinese witch hazels. It has yellow flowers (fine with me), hangs onto its leaves while it blooms (not fine with me), but I love it faults and all. It's a beautiful tree spring summer and fall and when it blooms in late winter it's very sweetly fragrant.

Hubricht's Amsonia turns a vivid shade of gold in the fall until a freeze turns it a more subdued bronze color.

This Hubricht's/ Willowleaf hybrid hasn't turned as pure a yellow but is still lovely.

Then ~ the rugosas, many of which had set a beautiful crop of hips, began to turn color. How could I have forgetten? Gold, with some of the rubra and Hansas flushed with pink and rose. The smaller prairie rose (R. arkansana), Carolina and Virginia roses are even colored with yellow, orange, red and purple.

Some of the red maples just inside the wood's edge ~ which had been buffered from Sandy's wind by trees now stripped bare ~ started to turn wonderful colors of gold and peach and red.

This red maple on the property line managed to keep some leaves. It always turns a tangerine color. Red maples are highly variable overall. Some just turn yellow, others start out as yellow and add red, and a few are just pure blood red.

Next: The late turners.