Colors of Fall, large and small

kw: photographs, autumn, seasons

About half the leaves have changed in my neighborhood. These trees that border a schoolyard are about as nice a view as I've seen this year. This is a stitch of four photos. Click on it to see a 1600-pixel-wide version.

A stump near the schoolyard has become covered with small shelf fungi (what the Japanese call "tree ears") over the past several years. The view on the right (or below, depending how your browser composites these images) is what we typically see, looking from above. For the one on the left (maybe above), I held the camera below the same spot. These are low to the ground, so recent rains have splashed a lot of dirt particles onto the lower surfaces.


The bush honeysuckle berries are about as nice as they are likely to get. These bushes abound along a path through the woods that we take to get to the schoolyard.

Later in the season, migrating birds will eat the berries, but I'm told they are not edible by people. I didn't try. I remember the Pyracantha berries that used to line the street where I lived in my grade school years. The orange berries were dry and tasteless, and could give you an upset stomach, but at certain times of year the birds devoured them. Thinking about it, I recall a number of berries, including some nearly black purple ones, that birds eat but people don't.

Of course, there are plenty of autumn fruits that people do eat. When we lived in South Dakota, we would gather chokecherries and serviceberries to make jam. One of my professors and I used to simply eat the chokecherries. At first, they are astringent, but you get used to it, then they are very tasty. But when you've had enough, your mouth puckers up nice and tight!

These little crab apples, on a new tree in my yard, are edible, just. They are pretty sour. I decided to leave them on the tree; they will cling until Spring, when migrating birds will strip them off the tree some fine afternoon. When the tree gets bigger I'll start harvesting some of them to make jelly.

On second thought, maybe I'll make them into a jam instead; just strain out the seeds. One of the hardest things about making any apple jelly is getting the juice out of the pulp. Other fruits can be strained through muslin and need just a little squeezing to yield the juice. Apples seem to have invented the super-absorbent gel and one loses most of the juice without using a mechanical press. I gave up on that years ago; now if I want to make apple jelly I buy a bottle of cider and start with that.

Here's one more tree I saw after taking the panorama. It illustrates the tendency of many maples to get redder where they've been colder, or where they were "nipped" first. The color gradation of this tree is very nice.

All this on a walk to the schoolyard to pick up black walnuts!