“Last week has been the most beautiful autumn weather. For three days the woods were blazing and we just wandered around admiring this leaf and that. But yesterday there was a windstorm and they all blew off.”
“The scene is of a dark forest, perhaps in the Adirondacks. A river pours from bottom center to middle center. Beyond a wooden gate on the left rises a big country house. Of simple gable design, the house has latticed shutters and a red roof that give it a Germanic feel. A rustic log bridge without side rails spans the river. The surface is decked with planks and wide enough to allow the passage of freight wagons and stagecoaches. There are no human figures. The style of this work is self-consciously Hudson River School, with stylized, almost tropical-looking vegetation…. Still, the season is clear….
“It’s autumn. Orange colors some of the trees, which may be sugar maples.”
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For this post, the second of two… more trees! more leaves! more orange!
If you would like to see my previous fall color posts for this year, they’re all organized under this tag:
“I never saw an autumnal landscape so beautifully painted as this was. It was like the richest rug imaginable spread over an uneven surface; no damask nor velvet, nor Tyrian dye or stuffs, nor the work of any loom, could ever match it.”
“Whether in the heart of the city or the thick of the wilderness, our indigenous soul stirs and comes awake whenever we find ourselves thinking in storied form, and so the buildings lean toward us and the trees in the backyard begin to speak in low, groaning tones as the trunks rub against one another. If we are thinking in literate, logical terms then these tones are not voices, but when we’re thinking in stories then they are indeed a kind of speaking, for to the oral imagination every entity has its eloquence….
“The breeze is an elixir carrying the chemistry of the needles up through the double arch of our nostrils to burst as a steady tang on the moist membranes inside, while the autumn blue of the sky, as it filters through the branches, is itself a kind of wine casting a giddy charm upon our limbs, making us crouch and leap with pleasure….”
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For this and the next post, I’ve assembled photo collections of large trees around the neighborhood and at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, those whose leaves turned seriously orange over the past couple of weeks. These are maple and oak trees, not to be confused with orange trees at all; though if one was speaking in color, it wouldn’t be wrong to call them orange trees. What????
They really are massive trees; you can get some sense of the scale from those images below where I included nearby brick sidewalks (this one, for example). Photographing them from different positions and angles (and in a mix of clouds and sun) was definitely an immersive autumn experience.
If you would like to see my previous fall color posts for this year, they’re all organized under this tag:
“During these blessed color-days no cloud darkens the sky, the winds are gentle, and the landscape rests, hushed everywhere, and indescribably impressive. A few ducks are usually seen sailing on the lake, apparently more for pleasure than anything else, and the ouzels at the head of the rapids sing always; while robins, grosbeaks, and the Douglas squirrels are busy in the groves, making delightful company, and intensifying the feeling of grateful sequestration without ruffling the deep, hushed calm and peace.
“This autumnal mellowness usually lasts until the end of November. Then come days of quite another kind. The winter clouds grow, and bloom, and shed their starry crystals on every leaf and rock, and all the colors vanish like a sunset.”
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For this post, I took a closer look at the autumn ground featured in the previous one (see Autumn Groundcover (1 of 2)) and picked out a few prominent leaves that could be isolated and photographed with a macro lens. There are five such images below, followed by five additional recreations with the backgrounds rendered as black. On black backgrounds, the shapes, colors, and textures really stand out, don’t you think?
If you would like to see my previous fall color posts for this year, they’re all organized under this tag:
“With the autumn begins in some measure a new spring. The plover is heard whistling high in the air over the dry pastures, the finches flit from tree to tree, the bobolinks and flickers fly in flocks, and the goldfinch rides on the earliest blast, like a winged hyla peeping amid the rustle of the leaves. The crows, too, begin now to congregate; you may stand and count them as they fly low and straggling over the landscape, singly or by twos and threes, at intervals of half a mile, until a hundred have passed.”
“In autumn, when the colors are ripe, the whole circular grove, at a little distance, looks like a big handful of flowers set in a cup….”
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I spent one of my recent autumn photo-shoots looking mostly at the ground. Gravity and the fall wind position the leaves in some of the most delightful arrangements of shape, pattern, and color, so I set out to capture a few images where those arrangements caught my eye. Admittedly — since I’m basically an adult-adjacent kid at heart — some shuffling and kicking through the leaves did also occur… but not until after I took the photos!
While I was taking these pictures, I heard a leaf blower off in the distance, so it’s not impossible that some of these patterns were created by one of those satanic wind machines. I do own one, I’ll admit: it resides just inside my crawlspace door where it’s been idle for about a decade, gathering under-house dust while it rests there unused. It’s a “deluxe model” actually, one of those that you can use to vacuum up leaves which it then sucks through a grinder, reduces them to a fine powder, then deposits them in an attached (and very large) canvas bag. Sounds efficient, huh?
I used that capability once: the exploding noises made by leaves, sticks, and occasional bits of pea gravel getting pulverized a few inches from my stomach and groin just about drove me insane while I considered what would happen if the mechanism split open — which struck me as inevitable (though in real life wouldn’t happen, probably) and potentially life-changing (and not in a good way). What got the machine rendered into crawlspace oblivion however was an untended consequence of its mulching: since I live in an urban area and yard trimmings and debris have to be placed for curbside pickup in paper lawn bags, I had to transfer the ground leaves to those bags. So…
Imagine my surprise when I dumped the leaves from the stuffed canvas bag into a paper one and a cloud of leaf dust rose up like a desert sandstorm filling my back yard, covering the brick courtyard, the walls of the house, two windows, and a double-glass door — all of which I had to spend the next two hours hosing off and windexing until they were clean again. It’s probably true that I exaggerate here occasionally, for fun, just to entertain myself (and hopefully you’s)… but this is exactly what happened.
Later that same day… I went out and bought a new rake.
🙂
If you would like to see my previous fall color posts for this year, they’re all organized under this tag:
“There are … the winds of autumn, those that whirl through the streets tearing the dry, ruddy-brown leaves from their moorings. Alive with the scents of fallen fruit and soil and smoke, the autumn wind teases our nostrils as it whooshes past, scattering the humped piles of carefully raked leaves, mingling their constituents with other leaves spiraling down from the branches…
“Our bodies witness this gradual release of leaves, this stripping away of color from the gray, skeletal limbs, and cannot help but feel that the animating life of things is slipping off into the air — that the wind moaning in our ears is composed of innumerable spirits leaving their visible bodies behind….
“The wind is haunted, alive. Only in this liminal season, before the onset of winter, does the wild psyche of the land assert itself so vividly that even the most rational persons find themselves lost, now and then, in the uncanny depths of the sensuous….”
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Below are a few images from my previous post — Autumn Yellow, Autumn Orange (1 of 2) — with their backgrounds converted to black. Yellow on black, orange on black …. hmmmmmm, gorgeous!
Click this link if you would like to see my previous fall color posts for this year:
