From “Tom’s Garden” by Margie Ruddick in Architecture of the Everyday by Steven Harris and Deborah Berke:
“When I was small, the straight dirt roads had a wild character despite their layout: a tangle of trees, shrubs, vines, and native grasses screened the houses that nestled in the growth….
“Many people … had carved small gardens out of their back yards, and you could catch a glimpse, around the corners of the houses, of small emerald green patches, proper gardens with wisteria, hydrangea, and daylilies. While the face toward the road was often unkempt and chaotic, the small private world behind the house was often lush and well groomed; each of these gardens was different from the next.”
From “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” in The Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau by Henry David Thoreau:
“The wind in the woods sounded like an incessant waterfall dashing and roaring amid rocks, and we even felt encouraged by the unusual activity of the elements. He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair….
“That night was the turning-point in the season. We had gone to bed in summer, and we awoke in autumn; for summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable point of time, like the turning of a leaf.”
The Thoreau quote above pretty much captures the seasonal change to instant autumn here in the southeast: suddenly temperatures drop from the seventies into the forties and thirties for a couple of days, and many recently green things seem to turn yellow, orange, and red over night. As I was working through a couple of batches of new fall-color photos, I pulled out these few of vines climbing among the statues at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens — the last leaves still hanging from their stems, sometimes suspended in midair as they stretched from their attachment points.
The last image below is a minimalist variation of the one just above it, where I let Lightroom select the subject and it chose only the central vine and the single leaf on it. Then I converted the background to white and added some yellow and orange saturation, to emphasize the leaf and give the vine a little extra punch.
Thanks for taking a look!
