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.
