There was a rhyme I loved as a little kid, about Jack Frost flitting through the trees in October, splashing them with color from his paintbrush. I couldn’t help but notice that some trees changed color without a frost, but I liked the story anyway. For one thing, it explained why the color was so splotchy, so haphazardly applied. For another, I was prone to spattering colors from my own brush when I painted. Jack Frost made this aspirational.
In my yard now the red of one maple seems to be making a nice segue into the gold of another, Jack mixing pigments on his palette. Did he run out of paint before he got to the lower leaves? Did he get distracted by the sky? He gets no credit for the sky.
The dogwood, ivory-cupped star of the spring and red-berried birdfest of late summer, has another trick up its sleeve: an embarrassment of riches, reds, reds, and more reds. Jack must have made several trips for that one. Untouched trees behind it lend extra depth.
But Jack did not have total artistic license. Some colors obviously went with some trees: orangey reds on the sugar maples, yellow in the wild black cherries. The trees in the yard where I grew up were mostly oaks, and only the pin oaks went in for color. The others could charitably be called yellow, but khaki was more like it. They went on from there to brown, and did not fall off till new leaves pushed them out of the way, in spring. I’m sure the squirrels appreciated the winter shelter.
While the deciduous oaks held their leaves for winter, the evergreen pines are more mysterious. The green groundcover in this photo is mountain mint, green until frost, brown through the winter, and green again in spring. Overhead in the trees all is green, too, but fine brown needles drift down and pile up on the ground underneath. Careful inspection shows that these are the needles farthest back on every branch, ceding the work of staying green to new growth at the tips. Being evergreen requires continual renewal, like the re-telling favorite stories. Like the story of Jack Frost.
The late warm season continues. Most of the flowers are gone, but there’s still a lot of autumn color. The spirea planted in front is mostly down to bare branches, but this one in a pot on the deck is still in glory. This is odd, first because the front yard gets more sunshine, facing south, and the deck faces north; but also because roots in the ground get more protection from weather than roots in pots do. Nature surprises us whenever she wishes. The potted spirea is a volunteer – a pot of nigella was colonized by free-range spirea seed, and quickly became too lovely to remove. Here it is garnished by a couple of immigrant maple leaves, likely carried by whatever forces brought the spirea seed.
Here’s the donor tree for those maple leaves, with just a little left in its branches to continue decorating the yard.
My herb collection has a mixed response to autumn. I had to bring the basil indoors, but thyme and sage will persevere outside all the way to Thanksgiving. The pot of mint may not last quite so long, but meanwhile has collected its own leaf embellishment.
Meanwhile, after much inspection via the internet, I ordered a memorial stone for my wonderful cat, Zerlina. Many of those offered had elaborate decorations and extensive text, but none came up to Zerlina’s level of elegance. I chose one in her colors, with a soft shape. Not that a stone will be puffy, but hard angled edges seemed wrong. Doug came out to the garden with me while I buried her ashes in the center of the garden next to the thyme, and placed the stone on top. I needed the hugs. Then I sat for a while on my glider bench, thinking about her. The thyme will spread, and maybe I’ll encourage it to surround the whole stone. I haven’t decided yet, but thyme sounds like it belongs with memorials.
Then I went back into the house, where I picked up all the pumpkins and put them back in different places. I had to remember that things can change. And I found a sort of puffy one for the hearth.
This morning my sprinkler guy, Craig, came and winterized the system. It’s pretty exciting to watch – he hooks up his air compressor, and it blows the water out of all the pipes at once, like an inverted thunderstorm. All over the yard, clouds rise out of the ground as if the woodchuck is popping open a lot of champagne.
We haven’t had a frost yet, but with the cooler temperatures and shorter hours of daylight, what flowers remain won’t need me to water them. When I moved here fifteen years ago, Labor Day was the time to bring in your tender plants before the frost. Now, Columbus Day is in plenty of time. My bougainvillea gets a spot the sunniest window.
Next up will be bringing the pillows in from the deck. You see the white puff on this one – that’s the spot where the little red squirrel has been pulling stuffing out and carrying it away. I tried to take a picture of him at it, but he was way too fast for me. I also tried to see where he was taking it, but he was too fast for that, too. My first impulse when I saw this marauder, was to save the pillow by bringing it in. Two considerations made me leave it out there: one, that taking it away would encourage him to break into another pillow, whereas leaving it might mean only this one pillow was damaged; and two, it was very entertaining to watch him pack improbable amounts of fluff into his mouth for each trip. Squirrels don’t hibernate, but build nests for warmth in the winter.
It doesn’t take a frost for the burning bushes to live up to their name. The color is glorious, and it’s very generous with its seeds, a benefit to the birds and small mammals that stay for the winter. Burning bush is not native, and in many areas is considered an invasive pest with no natural predators. Around here, though, the deer are happy to step up.
Out in the garden I still have a few zinnias, but mostly I have miniature pumpkins. I love growing them myself because they’re small enough not to overrun the garden, and I get to cut them with long stems and curlicues still attached. Here they are perched on the hearth of my fireplace, on normal size bricks for a sense of scale. I’ll go down to one of the farms this week to buy some big pumpkins – some for the house, and some to set out on the porch where, when they’re finished building nests out of my pillow, the squirrels will have a handy pumpkin snack.
