Still More Fall Color

In the 1930s a French lady named Antoinette Sherri bought several hundred acres on the east side of Rattlesnake Mountain in Chesterfield New Hampshire and built a house there. The house, which some called a “castle,” was built of local stone by Italian stone masons and stood until 1962, when it was vandalized and burned. The photo above shows some of what little is left, and also shows how what little is left is slowly crumbling away. The arches are letting go.

There is a beaver pond on the property but I don’t think the beavers are active any longer.

The lodge looks unused but that was okay; I was here for the beauty, not the beavers or the stonework.

Oaks are turning some amazing colors this year.

Beeches are wearing their usual yellow but they’re still very beautiful.

Here’s another photo of the forest at Willard Pond that I took far too many of when I went there. It’s beautiful enough to see again, I think.

Though we have a long way to go to drought abatement we have had some rain and it’s nice to see the streams flowing again.

I saw a few fallen oak leaves and that means the bare trees of November must be just around the corner.

I love how lake sedge (Carex lacustris) seems to flow like the waves of the pond and lake shores it grows on. It is really the wind and its own weak stems that make it bend so, but I think it makes a pretty display. Lake sedge is native to Canada and the northern U.S. and can at times be found growing in water. Waterfowl and songbirds eat its seeds. Even when it isn’t blowing in the wind it seems to have movement.

I took the wrong road in Chesterfield and was glad I did. It was beautiful.

I finally got to the overlook that looks off toward the green hills of Vermont. It was also beautiful. It’s really too bad that people from other places couldn’t get here to see the foliage this year. In a normal year they come from all over the world to see this.

Here’s another shot from Willard Pond; what I call the far hill. Gosh it was beautiful.

And another shot of the forest at Willard Pond.

A backlit bit of forest in Chesterfield. What gorgeous colors we’ve seen this year, even in a drought. I’ve been told, over the course of my whole life I think, that adequate rainfall determined whether or not we’d see good leaf color. So much for that theory.

Even the bracken ferns have been colorful.

And the blueberry bushes. Never have I seen them as beautiful as they are this year.

The many colors of maple leaved viburnum could take an entire post to show. It’s one of our most colorful native shrubs and I love seeing it.

And then it looks like this; a pale almost non existent pink, just before the leaves fall.

While the maples have been a little disappointing the oaks are incredible.

The color range of oaks is always a surprise.

I caught a royal fern (Osmunda spectabilis) that was still wearing yellow. Once they start changing they quickly go from yellow to a kind of burnt orange to brown. Many people don’t realize that this is a fern and that’s why I show it so often. That and I like it.

Witch hazel leaves (Hamamelis virginiana) have gone brown but their yellow flowers still peek out from under them. In fact it’s common to find a bush full of blossoms and not a single leaf.

Witch alders (Fothergilla major) are beautiful in the fall and they show what the sun does to their leaf color. The yellow you see is where the sun hasn’t hit their leaves full on, but the red leaves have been in full sun. Does this mean that the sun causes them to lose their chlorophyll quicker? Witch alder is a native shrub related to witch hazel which grows to about 6-7 feet in this area. Though native to the southeast it does well here in the northeast, but it is almost always seen in gardens rather than in the wild. The fragrant flower heads are bottlebrush shaped and made up of many flowers that have no petals. What little color they have comes from the stamens, which have tiny yellow anthers at the ends of long white filaments.

I feel bad for saying the maples have been disappointing. I should have said that they had amazing color but their leaves fell quickly. I just read that drought and high heat cause trees to turn early and drop their leaves sooner, and that’s exactly what has happened. This small maple made it through and it was a knockout.

I’ll leave you with a moment of reflection. Beautiful yes, but many people far more knowledgeable about such things than I am have said that in reality, you are the beauty you see. Here’s one of them now:

The appearance of things changes according to the emotions; and thus we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves. ~Kahlil Gibran

Thanks for coming by.