Early September Flowers

We’re almost at that point of peak flower production now as this view across a stream shows. Goldenrod, tall asters, Joe Pye weed, boneset, and purple loosestrife can all be seen here. We’re still waiting on New England asters but it shouldn’t be long.

The funny little plants called false dandelion (Hypochaeris radicata) have appeared in force and I’m seeing them everywhere. This plant gets its name from its resemblance to the dandelion, but it would be hard to mistake one for the other. The flowers are about half the size of a true dandelion and they bob around on long, wiry stems. At a glance you might think you were seeing a hawkweed flower when you look at a false dandelion flower because they’re close to the same size. One look at the leaves however, will show you that you’re seeing something entirely different because they resemble those of the dandelion more than hawkweed foliage. Hawkweed and false dandelion also bloom at different times, which helps when trying to identify them.

False dandelion leaves look like miniature versions of dandelion leaves and are nowhere near as wide or as long.

White wood asters (Aster divaricatus) lined a woodland path and made a pretty walk even prettier.

I always find silverrod in dry, gravelly places at the edge of the woods near the end of August. It’s hard to get a photo of because it’s usually surrounded by other plants and rarely grows alone. It grows about knee high and isn’t seen anywhere near as often as the yellow goldenrods.

I think almost everyone knows what goldenrod looks like but not everyone has seen silverrod. Silverrod (Solidago bicolor) is in the goldenrod family and is also called white goldenrod. It is the only native white flowered goldenrod found in the northeast. The small flowers spiral up the stem and open from the top down.

Tansy (Tanacetum vulgare) is a European native that has been cultivated for centuries, even grown in the herb gardens of Charlemagne. It was brought from England by early colonists and by 1785 it had naturalized in New England. The flat flower heads are made up of many button like disc flowers; almost like a daisy without the white ray flowers that we call petals. Tansy is a natural insect repellent and has historically been used as such. Dried tansy added to the straw in mattresses was said to keep bedbugs away. I rarely see it in nature but it can still be occasionally found growing along roadsides. It’s a good plant to use in vegetable gardens for pest control. The ancient Greeks grew tansy for medicinal use but modern science has found it to be toxic.

White rattlesnake root (Prenanthes alba) can be tough to identify because even plants growing side by side can have differently shaped leaves, but once they bloom identification becomes much easier. I can’t think of another plant that has small, drooping white, lily like blossoms at this time of year. The half inch flowers appear in clusters at the end of branched stems that can reach 5 or 6 feet in some cases, and have forked stamens that are longer than the petals. The plant gets its common name from the Native American belief that it could cure rattlesnake bites.

I saw a hosta recently in a park that was just another plain green unremarkable plant, but the reason I’m showing it here is because of its huge white flowers.

This hosta had the biggest flowers I’ve ever seen; at least three times the size of a “normal” flower.

I decided to visit Meetinghouse Pond in Marlborough one day to see what was growing there this year. Last year I found some really interesting plants there.

One of the first things I noticed at the pond was a big bull thistle (Cirsium vulgare,) all in bloom. I don’t usually see them bloom like this. They usually have two or three flowers and many closed buds waiting in the wings. You can see a bee loving the flower over in the upper left quadrant.

Asters grew in standing water at the shoreline. For that reason and the fact that the small, sword shaped leaves had no stems (petioles) I think they were bog asters (Oclemena nemoralis.) Each unbranched stem grew to about a foot tall and  had a single, light purple flower at its tip.

No matter what their name the flowers were beautiful. Because the plant usually grows in thickets in wet, swampy areas many people never see them.

This pond is the only place I know of to find native sneezeweed (Helenium autumnale.) I’ve never seen it anywhere else in the wild and I don’t know how it got here, but it was worth the drive to see it.

Sneezeweed’s common name comes from its dried leaves being used as snuff. It was inhaled to cause sneezing  because sneezing was thought to rid the body of evil spirits and both men and women used it. The Helenium part of the scientific name comes from Helen of Troy. One  legend regarding the plant says that it grew wherever her tears fell.

Sneezeweed has curious winged stems and this is a good way to identify them. It is a poisonous plant and no part of it should be eaten. It also contains compounds that have been shown effective in the treatment of tumors. The Native American Cherokee tribe used the plant medicinally to induce sneezing and as an aid in childbirth.

Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica) still blooms here and there but it’s pretty well finished for this year. Its final act will be to drop millions of seeds before it dies back completely until spring. This plant was brought to Europe from Japan sometime around 1829. It was taken to Holland and grown in nurseries that sold it as an ornamental. From there it found its way across the Atlantic where we still do battle with it today. It is one of the most invasive plants known and the only plant I have ever seen overtake it is purple loosestrife, which is also an invasive weed. Japanese knotweed is also a tough plant that is very hard to eradicate once it has become established.

Pink turtleheads (Chelone lyonii) still bloomed in a local park and though the flowers seemed fine the plants themselves looked terrible; all black and crisp leaves. My plants haven’t even showed color on the buds yet, but I hope they do better than these. I don’t know the origin of this plant and have never known if it was a native or a cultivar but it does very well in my yard and asks for nothing. Pink turtleheads are native to the southeastern U.S. and don’t seem to mind dryness in spite of naturally growing near water.

I always like to see if I can get a shot looking down the throat of the turtle. It’s very hairy in there but it doesn’t bother bumblebees. They were swarming over these plants on this day but I didn’t see any honeybees on these or any other flowers in the park.  

This little plant was hard to identify. I think I’ve tried for about three weeks off and on but I finally settled on catchfly (Silene armeria,) which is originally from Europe and which is also called sweet William catchfly. It is said to be an old fashioned garden plant in Europe. I’ve never seen it here but it is supposed to be a “casual weed” in New Hampshire. The name catchfly comes from the sticky sap it produces along its stem. Small insects are said to get caught in it but I didn’t see any on this single plant. Its leaves and stems were a smooth blue grayish color and along with the small pinkish purple flowers they made for a very pretty little plant that I’m hoping to see more of.

Just imagine becoming the way you used to be as a very young child, before you understood the meaning of any word, before opinions took over your mind. The real you is loving, joyful, and free. The real you is just like a flower, just like the wind, just like the ocean, just like the sun. ~Miguel Angel Ruiz

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More Fall Color

Though we still have a lot of colorful foliage to see we are now just past peak color and leaves (mostly maple) are falling quickly. The birch trees clinging to this rock face still had plenty of their bright yellow leaves though. That beautiful blue color you see is caused by wet spots on the stone that reflected the blue of the sky.

Here is a hillside that’s considerably more populated than the one in the previous photo. Many of the trees were already bare when this was taken and by the time you see this post I’m guessing that the biggest part of this hillside will be bare. It’s amazing how fast it can happen, especially with rain and wind, and that tells me I’d better be climbing a mountain soon if I want to see the colors from above.

If you thought you saw plum purple in that previous photo you might have; white ash trees (Fraxinus americana) often turns purple in the fall.

White ash is also called American ash. Along with purple they’ll turn red, orange or yellow in the fall. They turn early along with the maples and are one of our most beautiful fall trees.

Another hillside with some bare trees. And cows.

The trees along the Branch River in Marlborough were showing some good color. Marlborough was settled in 1764 and before that it was a fort town known as Monadnock number 5. Marlborough grew to be an important quarry town and granite from here was used in buildings in Boston and Worcester Massachusetts. Today slightly over 2,000 people live there and I drive through it every day to and from work.

Up north of Keene in Surry the Ashuelot River can just be glimpsed through the trees. Surry is another small town. With a population of only 732 in 2010 in hasn’t grown much since the first census was taken in 1790. It had 448 residents then. It also has some beautiful fall foliage.

Surry also has Surry Mountain and it had quite a lot color on the day that I was there.

Surry Mountain has a lot of evergreens on it, mostly pine and hemlock, and they and the deciduous trees sometimes grow in wide swaths of one kind or the other without much mixing.

The mountain also had a few bare trees showing. Though they say that fall color was about 10 days later than average this year it seems like the maples aren’t hanging on to their leaves very long once they turn.

Our roadways still have plenty of color along them, either highways or back roads.

And so do our rail trails. This one is in Swanzey but they all look pretty much the same, bordered by a variety of trees. These happened to be maples.

Two ferns turn white quite early on in the fall; lady ferns (Athyrium filix-femina) like the one seen here are often first, and sensitive ferns (Onoclea sensibilis) usually just before a frost. In fact sensitive ferns got that name from early settlers who saw that it was very sensitive to frost and cold weather.

I’ve seen hundreds of royal ferns (Osmunda spectabilis) in the fall and they’ve all been yellow until I saw this one, which decided to be orange. I like it better than yellow but I may never see another one. Royal ferns are thought to live 100 years or more though, so I do have a chance.

There was quite a lot of red showing in Tenant Swamp in Keene. Most of the trees in this view are maples, I think, but there may be a yellow larch or two in there as well.

I took this photo looking into the forest so you could see what the woods look like at this time of year.

One of my favorite places to walk is on this trail around a local pond. On this day the trail was carpeted with newly fallen leaves and the sight, sounds, and smell of them made me 10 years old again. I used to love walking through leaves just like these on the way to school.

Many people don’t realize that certain evergreens lose needles in the fall just as deciduous trees lose their leaves. White pine needles (Pinus strobus) like those seen here first turn yellow and then brown before finally falling. These examples fell in the pond water and made interesting patterns. You can find huge amounts of fallen needles like these along our back roads.  I used to fill trash bags full of them each year for a lady who used them as mulch.

I know everyone likes to see the colors reflected in glass-like water but October is a windy month and undisturbed water is hard to come by. Luckily the pond is protected by a big hill on one side so some parts of it were sheltered from the worst of the wind.

This is about as good as it got for reflections this time around I’m afraid, but there should be more in future posts.

Like being inside a kaleidoscope, that’s what this season is. Here are more of those fallen leaves I used to love walking through so much as a boy. I wish you could smell them. There is nothing else like it.

The fallen leaves in the forest seemed to make even the ground glow and burn with light ~Malcolm Lowry

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More Fall Color

I had three days off due to the Columbus Day holiday but a heavy cloud cover decided to park itself over the entire region, so most of the photos you’ll see here were taken under gray skies. But this makes things interesting for me, because there is a long running argument that says colors “pop” better on cloudy days than they do on sunny ones. For me it depends. If the sun is behind me and I’m looking at the sun shining on the foliage the scene can be very beautiful, but on cloudy days you don’t have to worry about where the sun is. The colors still “pop” but in a different way, as this view from Howe Reservoir in Dublin shows. Mount Monadnock would have shown in the background if not for the low clouds.

I moved along the shoreline of the reservoir trying to get shots of the best color. An Asian couple did the same, taking selfies with their phones, presumably because the people back home would never believe this. Actually I’ve heard that there are people who think it couldn’t be real; that the colors had to have been faked somehow, but then they came here and found that nature can indeed be pretty colorful.

We still haven’t reached peak color yet so many trees like oak and beech are still green. It seems to start in swaths or pockets throughout the forest before finally the entire forest is ablaze with colors of every hue. I watch the hillsides that surround Keene and when they are showing quite a lot of color that’s my signal to start climbing and try to photograph it from above. So far I haven’t had much luck but I keep trying. My breathing is ragged this year so I’ll probably only get one try. I’ll try to make it a good one.

Birches tend to grow in groves, often mixed in with other species, so it’s hard to isolate a single tree to show you their fall leaf color, but this one conveniently leaned out over the water all by itself. They don’t vary much from the clear yellow that you see here, although I have seen red and orange leaves on birch trees occasionally.

In the fall blueberries come in yellow, orange, red, and the plum color seen here. They grow wild around our lakes and ponds. I can’t think of a single body of fresh water I’ve been on in this state that didn’t have blueberries on its shores. They are very common and their numbers are staggering.

In the last fall color post I showed some cinnamon ferns that were orange. Usually their cousins the interrupted ferns (Osmunda claytoniana) also turn orange but this one at Howe Reservoir was bright yellow.

Sometimes just a single tree seems enough.

But a single tree can never match the beauty of an entire forest wearing its fall colors. The asters were a bonus.

Red maples (Acer rubrum) don’t mind wet feet so they are often found it wet places, and that is why they’re also called swamp maples by many people. In fact some swamps are called red maple swamps. As this view into a swamp shows they come in various shades of yellow, orange, red and are one of our most colorful fall trees. They’re also called soft maple and scarlet maple. These trees can get quite big; the largest known red maple lives in Michigan and is 125 feet tall with a circumference of over 16 feet.

Both main roads and back roads are getting colorful now.  You don’t realize how many people come to see the foliage until you drive a road like this one. Usually you can walk on this road and not see a car all day, but on this day it was like a super highway. I had to wait a while to get a shot with no cars in it.

False Solomon’s seal (Maianthemum racemosum) had colorful leaves but no berries. They get eaten fast and I haven’t been able to find any ripe ones yet this year.

I still haven’t seen any scarlet poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) leaves but I did see some that I thought were pink. Unfortunately my color finding software sees the sky reflected off the leaves and thinks the few leaves in the lower right corner are several shades of blue.

Wild river grape leaves (Vitis riparia) turn yellow in the fall and this is a great time to find them because they stand out better now than at any other time of year.

I couldn’t let a warm and dry fall day go by without visiting the Ashuelot River. I started in the northern part of town and sure enough the tree that always changes before all the others had done it again. I can’t get close to it so I have no idea what it is, but it’s always early.

After visiting the northern part of town I visited town center at Ashuelot Park. This stretch of river is one of my favorites in the fall because the banks are lined with colorful maples. You have to come here relatively early though, because many maples change early and that means they drop their leaves early. In a week or so when I’m at other places admiring colorful foliage the trees here might be all but bare.

The falls over the old Colony dam on West Street turned to molten gold in the afternoon sun.

One of the reasons I love to come here at this time of year is because of the way the afternoon sun sets the trees ablaze with color. It’s beautiful and seeing people just standing and staring or taking photos is common. One girl with a camera told me she comes here every day. It’s a place people come to immerse themselves in the beauty of fall.

But which is more beautiful, the sunlight coming through the trees or falling on the trees? I can never decide so I always get shots of both. The colors are amazing no matter how you look at them.

I’ve been looking at this shot of a turtle on a log for nearly a week now, trying to think of what I wanted to say about it. What a lucky turtle is about all I can come up with. Not profound maybe, but I wouldn’t have minded spending some time on that log myself. I can’t imagine being any more immersed in nature than that.

I meant to do my work today, but a brown bird sang in the apple tree, and a butterfly flitted across the field, and all the leaves were calling. ~Richard le Gallienn

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More Fall Foliage

Though we do have some bare trees now all the warm weather we’ve had lately seems to be keeping a lot of the leaves on the trees. I thought I’d take a drive down one of our many country roads recently to see one of my favorite views of Mount Monadnock, and to see what the foliage was like there. The above photo shows what the road looked like and also shows that yes, I stopped to take photos. Luckily there isn’t much traffic on most of these back roads but even if there was we’re used to seeing people stopped on the side of the road with cameras at this time of year.

And oh, the things you see along these back roads. You really just have to stop sometimes and let yourself absorb the beauty of it all. This kind of magic isn’t something that we who live here take for granted; if you came here to see the foliage you would find that many of us locals would be standing right there beside you, and like you we’d be knocked speechless by the beauty of it all.

This view shows you what we were just driving through, with Mount Monadnock in the background. This is one of my favorite views of the mountain, but the bright sunshine made the foliage colors all look orange to me again.

I thought this red maple tree (Acer rubrum) was beautiful enough to have its own photo.

Maple trees can be any one of several colors including yellow, orange and red, and often once they have fallen they turn a beautiful deep purple. The leaves in this photo seemed to be heading towards yellow.

This is a view of the red maple trees along Route 101, which is a busy highway. Highway or back road it doesn’t matter, because you find this everywhere you go.

The sun chose a yellow leaved maple tree to spotlight and it looked like someone had thrown a great handful of yellow confetti out over the Ashuelot River. Sometimes you just have to say gosh, will you look at that. Hopefully you will have a camera in your hands when you do.

But isn’t it funny how the direction and intensity of the light can make a scene look so different? Like the previous photo this is a shot of the Ashuelot River in bright sunlight, but how very different the two scenes look. Photographers want to know these things so they can take them into account when taking a photo, but the path to that knowledge is usually strewn with many thousands of rejected photos. Of course it could be worse; that path could be strewn with rejected paintings.

This view from along the Ashuelot River shows how some maples have lost their leaves. Usually though, oak and beech trees start to turn and are at their peak just after the maples lose their leaves, so there is an unbroken line of color that can sometimes last a month. I think this year it will last more than a month.

Many of the leaves fall into the water and end up at the bottom of the river.

But while they float they’re still pretty.

On shore you might see the red / orange foliage of marsh St. Johnswort (Hypericum virginicum.) Many St. Johnsworts have a lot of red in them in their buds and seed pods, but I can’t think of another that I’ve seen with red leaves. Marsh St. Johnswort is also unusual because of its pink rather than yellow flowers.

Our hillsides still have good color but I’m seeing more bare trees on them too. When all the color on this hillside is gone it’s going to seem a very dramatic change.

Many of our bracken ferns (Pteridium) have turned to their flat, pinkish brown color but this one still glowed. I love to look at the many different patterns on ferns.

Oriental bittersweet berries (Celastrus orbiculatus) have a three part yellow outer shell that encloses the tomato red berry.  Once the berries, each containing 3 to 6 seeds, are showing birds and small animals come along and snap them up, and that’s why this vining plant from China and Japan is so invasive. Its sale and planting are prohibited in New Hampshire but the berries make pretty Thanksgiving centerpieces, so many people go out and cut what they find in the wild before the holidays. This also helps the plant spread.

This year the record warmth is making the process go very slowly, but the burning bushes (Euonymus alatus) along the Ashuelot River in Swanzey are still changing to their pink / magenta color. Just before the leaves fall they’ll turn a soft, very pale pastel pink. The leaves on the trees above them seem to help regulate how quickly the burning bush leaves change color by keeping frost from touching them. In years when the overhanging branches lose their leaves early there is a good chance that the burning bushes will also lose theirs quickly. There have been years when I’ve seen hundreds of bushes all lose their leaves overnight.

The burning bushes might lose their leaves quickly some years but the berries will persist until birds have eaten every one of them. That’s what makes them one of the most invasive plants in the area and that is why, like Oriental bittersweet, their sale and cultivation have been banned in New Hampshire.

Just as beautiful but nowhere near as invasive are our native maple leaf viburnums (Viburnum acerifolium.) This one had the same pink as the burning bushes, but this small shrub can wear many colors, from orange to deep purple, and yellow to pale pink. I’m not sure if each one has the same colors year to year or if weather affects and changes their color each year.

You often get lucky and see two colors on maple viburnum leaves. I thought these purple and orange ones were absolutely beautiful with the beech leaves as a backdrop.

Few plants can outshine the beautiful deep purple of bittersweet nightshade (Solanum dulcamara.) This native of Europe and Asia is in the same family as potatoes and tomatoes and produces solanine, which is a narcotic, and the plant is considered toxic. It was used medicinally in medieval times, possibly as a dangerous sedative. In large enough doses solanine can paralyze the central nervous system.

The water was warm and the air cool one morning, and a gray mist rose from Half Moon Pond in Hancock. The light was also quite dim with the sun still behind the hills, so I was surprised that this photo came out at all. The time falls back an hour next weekend as daylight saving time ends. I’m not looking forward to it being dark at 5:00 pm, but I will be happy to see sunny mornings again.

Oak and beech trees are usually the last to change in this part of New Hampshire and they have just started changing. That means that the astounding colors found in the oak and beech forest that surrounds Willard Pond in Antrim should be just about at their peak and perfect now, so that’s where I’m headed today. Hopefully the next fall foliage post that you see on this blog will be from there, one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen in the fall.

Beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love. ~Anonymous

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More Fall Colors

After a cool night or two suddenly the leaves started changing again. And it was sudden; I drive by this spot every day and in just a day or two the colors brightened into what you see here. I used to think that it was day length that made the trees change and that probably does play a large part in the process, but this year has shown that temperature does as well. If the leaves start to change and it gets hot, they stop changing until it cools off again. Meanwhile, they can and do fall while they’re still green.

These opening photos were taken at Howe Reservoir in Dublin, New Hampshire and that’s Mount Monadnock in the background. Mount Monadnock is the second most climbed mountain in the world after Mount Fuji in Japan, and when the foliage changes it is standing room only up there. People come from all over the world to see the leaves and climb the mountain and it gets very busy here, already noticeable in the extra traffic on the roadways.

Speaking of roadways, here is what they look like. It doesn’t matter where this was taken because pretty much every roadside looks like this in this part of the state right now.

If you stop along the road and get out of the car this is usually what you’re faced with; an impenetrable thicket of brush and trees, but a colorful one at this time of year.

Each year I struggle with the question of whether the colors are more vibrant on a cloudy day or a sunny day. I think a cloudy day is best for foliage color but it’s a trade off because it’s darker on cloudy days. That means you have to open up the aperture of the lens to let in more light so the camera can see the foliage colors. When you do that with my camera you get great colors on the trees but the sky is overexposed. You’ve let so much light in that the blue of the sky gets washed out and becomes white, and that is what has happened in many of these photos. There are different ways around the problem but I’m not going to go into all of that technical mumbo jumbo here. A “faster” lens would be the best solution but that means buying a camera with interchangeable lenses, and I can’t swing that right now. This year I didn’t have a choice anyhow, because almost every time I had a chance to get outside with a camera it has been cloudy.

On the other hand, this is what bright sunlight can do. At sunup one morning on Half Moon Pond in Hancock the sun turned all of the trees on the far hillside the same golden color. Most of them are evergreens but there are a few hardwoods in yellow, orange and red, though you’d never know it.

There was some sun in this shot, just kissing the tree tops, and a touch of blue /gray in the sky.

Here is a shot of the Ashuelot River in Keene taken when the sun finally broke through the clouds. For me this shot isn’t as colorful as those shot on cloudy days. It might be colorblindness talking but it looks like all the colors have blended into one color. It all looks kind of orangey to me, even though it didn’t look that way in person. Maybe it’s just that the sun was low in the sky and warmed the colors.

Walking our rail trails at this time of year can be like walking into a kaleidoscope. Everywhere you look there are colors of every hue.

This winged sumac (Rhus copallinum) is a good example of vibrant color. I first found one of these shrubs this past summer and read that it turned a beautiful scarlet red in the fall, so I made sure I went back to see. I wasn’t disappointed.

Winged sumac gets its common name from the wings that form on the stem between each leaf pair. Another name for the plant is flame leaf sumac, with good reason.

But staghorn sumacs (Rhus typhina) aren’t bad either when it comes to fall color. These were very red.

This shows just how red a staghorn sumac can be in the fall. Some border on purple.

Early settlers noticed this fern’s sensitivity to frost and named it the sensitive fern (Onoclea sensibilis.) Just the slightest touch of frost will turn it completely brown but if the frost holds off like it has this year they will slowly go from green to yellow to finally white. This fern is a favorite of beavers but I’m not sure if they eat it or build beds with it. Last year I saw one swimming down the river with a large bundle of sensitive ferns in its mouth.

My favorite fern in the fall is the cinnamon fern (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum,) because they turn pumpkin orange. This is one of my favorite groves of them but this year I was late and most had already gone beyond orange to yellow.

The burning bushes (Euonymus alatus) along the Ashuelot River are turning quickly now and many are that odd magenta pink color that they turn. I’ve never seen one in a garden turn this color but here huge swaths of them all down the river bank can be this color. It’s actually a beautiful and breathtaking sight, but it would be better if these shrubs weren’t so invasive.

If you’re looking for colorful shrubs for the garden our native blueberries are a better choice than burning bushes. I’ve seen blueberries turn every color from yellow to orange and scarlet red to plum purple, as this example was. Not only would the garden have the beautiful fall colors but the gardener would get to eat all the delicious berries.

Birches are usually among the first trees to turn but they’ve been slow this year. Their leaves turn bright yellow but I think most of the color in this photo actually came from the low afternoon sun.

I was really surprised to see how many trees were already bare in this shot of one of our many hillsides.

The cows in this pasture were oblivious to the beauty all around them. Or maybe not. I wish I knew.

I drove all the way over to Perkins Pond in Troy to see my favorite view of Mount Monadnock but it was heavy with clouds and all of the leaves had already fallen. I waited for this cloud to pass and I did get a quick glimpse of the summit just before another cloud came along and covered it again. I think I’ve missed seeing the foliage colors in this spot every single year that I’ve done this blog. I know it happens here because I’ve seen photos of it, but it must happen much earlier than it does everywhere else. I’ve got to make a note to start watching in September next year.

Leaves aren’t the only places to see color. The colors of the rising sun were caught in the clouds early one recent morning. It was a beautiful way to start the day.

October gave a party;
The leaves by hundreds came –
The Chestnuts, Oaks, and Maples,
And leaves of every name.
The Sunshine spread a carpet,
And everything was grand,
Miss Weather led the dancing,
Professor Wind the band.
~George Cooper

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More Fall Color

Our fall color was off to a good start with a cool end to August but then it got hot, and then it got even hotter until this past week has seen record breaking heat in the 90s F. and tropical humidity. We haven’t had any beneficial rain for a couple of weeks either and all the stones seen in the view of Ashuelot River above show how low the water has gotten. The heat and lack of rainfall seem to have slowed the fall foliage transformation down dramatically but you can see some color along the Ashuelot. The yellow in the tree over on the left isn’t the tree’s color but comes from an Oriental bittersweet vine that has grown up it.

This is what oriental bittersweet can do. What you can’t see is how it wraps itself around the trunk and slowly strangles the tree. The reason I’m showing this is to point out how easy it is to spot this invasive vine at this time of year, and once you’ve spotted it you can eradicate it by cutting it and painting the cut surface with glycophosphate.

This view of the Ashuelot River in north Keene doesn’t show much fall color but it’s a pretty spot that I like visiting at all times of year.

White ash (Fraxinus americana) is one of the first trees to change in the fall and they usually start out bright yellow, but are often multicolored with yellow, orange, red and deep purple all on the same tree.

This photo gives an idea of the range of colors found in white ash trees.

Honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos) is another tree that turns early and is bright yellow. I’m guessing that this one is one of the many thornless cultivars developed from our native trees. Native honey locusts are very thorny, with sharp thorns that can be 4 or 5 inches long.

Though this photo doesn’t show a lot of foliage colors it’s another one of my favorite places, and on this day the trail led to some good color. Unseen just off to the left is the Ashuelot River and this trail follows it. The trail has been here for many years; possibly many hundreds of years, and I’ve been following it since I was a boy. Even so I usually see something here that I’ve never noticed before.

Colorblindness can make blogging difficult at times. I could see the red of the leaves on the red maple tree in the center of this photo just fine in person, but I can’t see them in the photo. They just blend into the other colors for me, but I’m including the photo because I know not everyone is colorblind and I think most of you will see those red leaves. At least I hope so.

Colorblindness can also be very subtle. The red maple in this photo I can see just fine, but I can’t tell you why. It’s something you learn to live with but at this time of year I’m never 100% sure of the colors I see. I once drove to a spot where there were some beautiful flaming orange maples, only to find when I got home and got the shot on the computer that my color finding software saw them as yellow green.

Colorblindness isn’t all bad though; colorblind people can often see camouflaged objects clearly and their services are highly valued by the armed forces. Outlines are clearly defined because they aren’t being blurred or muddled by color. I can see a black chanterelle (Craterellus cornucopioides) mushroom on the forest floor with ease even though many mushroom hunters say they are one of the most difficult to find, but if a red cardinal lands in a green tree it disappears instantly. In fact I’ve never seen a cardinal even when they were pointed out, so if the newer readers of this blog were wondering, that’s why you don’t see many birds in these posts. Or cardinal flowers.

I didn’t have any trouble seeing the pumpkin orange of this cinnamon fern (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum.) Many ferns are very colorful at this time of year and cinnamon ferns are one of the most beautiful.

For years I’ve said on this blog that lady ferns (Athyrium filix-femina) were the only ones I knew that turned white in fall, but I was forgetting about the sensitive fern (Onoclea sensibilis,) which often does the same. The above photo is of lady ferns. I haven’t found any white sensitive ferns yet, but they’ll be along.

I found a goldenrod with all of the color washed out of it, which is something I’ve never seen.

This is one of those trees that I saw as orange but fully expected to find out it was green when I got home, so I was happy when my color finding software told me it had orange in it. But it’s a kind of drab orange and some are saying that our fall colors won’t be quite as eye popping as usual this year because of the dryness and the heat. Last year we were in a drought and the colors were still beautiful, but we didn’t have tropical heat and humidity in September. It’s always a guessing game, so we’ll just have to wait and see. Peak color typically happens in mid-October here in the southern part of the state, so stay tuned.

These leaves fell off the tree in the previous photo. It’s amazing how many different colors can be on a maple tree at the same time.

The dogwoods are showing a lot of color this year. This large silky dogwood (Cornus amomum) was a deep maroon and stood out from the surrounding plants like a beacon.

This view of the Branch River in Marlborough is another of my favorites in the fall. Though the color finding software sees a lot of green it also sees red, orange and yellow. And of course the blue of the river. Rivers taught me that if I wanted to have this beautiful blue in a photo of them I had to snap the shutter when the sun was behind me.

Witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) has bright yellow leaves in the fall, and this is how they start to turn. Soon they will be full of small blossoms with yellow, strap shaped petals; our last and latest flower to bloom. Though they usually blossom in October during one mild winter I found them still blooming in January. We also had dandelions blooming in January that year.

Staghorn sumacs (Rhus typhina) are showing some great color this year, starting out in shades of orange before finally turning several shades of red. Red can be a very hard color to photograph and cameras don’t seem to like it but this appears to be an accurate shot of what I saw.

Crimson is just one of the several shades of red you can see on a staghorn sumac.

Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) is another plant that turns several shades of red but will also occasionally become deep purple. My mother loved this native vine so much that she planted it beside our porch before she died. It grew big enough to provide cool shade in summer and bright color in fall, and it is included in my earliest memories.

Friends of mine have a huge Virginia creeper growing up a tree near their house that has more berries on it than any Virginia creeper I’ve seen, but it refuses to turn red so this will have to do for now. The berries are poisonous to humans but many birds eat them, including thrushes, woodpeckers, warblers, vireos, mockingbirds, turkeys, and chickadees. Mice, red fox, skunks, chipmunks, squirrels and deer also like them so there is plenty of competition for the fruit. I’ve read that birds are more attracted to red berries than the blue-black berries of Virginia creeper, so the vine compensates by having red leaves and stems in the fall. When the birds land amidst all the red hues they find and eat the berries.  Since thirty five species of birds eat them it must be a successful ploy.

I found this Virginia creeper in a shaded part of the forest. I don’t know if it was ever red, but it was white and pale green when I saw it and I wanted to show it here so you could see how very different the same plants can appear in the fall. Sometimes it takes me a minute or two to figure out exactly what it is I’m seeing.

The New Hampshire bureau of tourism estimates that ten million people will come to see the fall foliage this year and I hope that each and every one of them will be able to see scenes like this one that I saw early one recent morning in Hancock. If you can’t make it to New Hampshire this year I hope you’ll have plenty of colorful foliage to see in your own area.

Why is it that so many of us persist in thinking that autumn is a sad season? Nature has merely fallen asleep, and her dreams must be beautiful if we are to judge by her countenance. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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Aimless Wandering

Last Sunday morning I woke from a dream of Mount Monadnock and drove to Perkins Pond in Troy to visit it. It might not be the tallest mountain but it is one of the prettiest, especially in winter when wearing a snowy cap. We had just gotten about 5 inches of snow 2 days before so it was a good time for photos.

It’s always hard to know how deep the snow is up there. I climbed to the summit in mid-April once and found snow well over waist deep in places. It was very rough going without snowshoes and I shouldn’t have done something so foolish. When I finally got back down I was dripping wet and looked like I had fallen into the pond.

There were ripples in the ice showing what you couldn’t see when it was in its liquid state. From here I decided to make the short drive to Dublin to see something I’d wanted to see since last summer.

It would have been a short drive if I had stayed on the highway but I decided to take the back way. I was able to go much more slowly than I could have on the highway and so was able to see more.

When I pulled over to take the previous photo of the road I heard chuckling and giggling and found that I’d parked near a stream that I didn’t know was there.

Ice baubles hung from the stones along its banks.

Once I’d reached Dublin Lake I saw what I had come to see. Each morning for the last 6 months I’ve seen this fallen tree on the shoreline out of the corner of my eye as I’ve driven past. Though I’ve only seen it for seconds at a time I’ve seen it burning orange from the light of the rising sun, deep indigo blue in the twilight before dawn, and as a black silhouette in fog so thick I could barely see the road. It has become something I look forward to seeing; a half way point on my journey and an oracle that hints at the weather for the coming day. I told myself that one day I’d see it in full daylight, and now I have.

I stopped at the branch river in Marlborough on my way back from Dublin to see if the melting snow had raised the water level. It didn’t seem any higher than normal and though there was a little snow on its banks there wasn’t a bit of ice on it that I could see.

I’d seen a lake and a pond covered with ice and a river with none, so I decided to visit a popular skating pond in a local Keene park. It told the story of our winter so far; yes, the ice grew but never thickened and it isn’t safe to be on anywhere in the state this. There has been no skating, hockey, ice fishing or much else that needs ice or snow this winter. Though I’m not a great lover of winter I am sorry that the people who enjoy it can’t have their fun. After all, I learned to skate on this very pond when I was a boy and spent many happy hours here.

These days I enjoy the pond more for the path around it rather than for the ice on it. Quite a few of the photos that have appeared on this blog over the years were taken here. It’s a great place to find fungi and slime molds and I saw my first maple dust lichen here. I’ve also seen otters playing, cormorants diving, turtles sunning, great blue heron fishing, and frogs hoping I didn’t see them.

The ice was thin enough to be nonexistent in many places around the shoreline. It was warm; about 48 degrees F, and it felt like a spring day. This weekend is supposed to be considerably different, with a high of 14 degrees F (-10 C) expected today. If the sun is shining it might be bearable for a short time, but there won’t be any hikes going on. Tonight they say we’ll see a -20 F (-29 C) wind chill and I hope I don’t have to be out in that.

Alders line the shore but they don’t seem to be in any hurry to produce pollen; there was no green dust to be seen on the catkins. They’re wise to wait, I think.

Apple moss (Bartramia pomiformis) in the upper left gets its common name from its tiny green, spherical spore capsules which someone thought looked like apples. Broom moss (Dicranum scoparium) in the lower right gets its common name from the way the leaves all point in the same general direction, making it look as if it had been swept by a broom. This photo shows that it would be very difficult to confuse them. Both seemed happy there by the pond.

The trees told the story of how the wind blew during the last storm.

There is more color to be seen in winter than most of us realize, but sometimes you have to look closely to see it.

Swamp dewberry (Rubus hispidus) looks like a vine but is actually considered a shrub. It likes wet places and is a good indicator of wetlands. It’s also called bristly blackberry because its stem is very prickly and its fruits look like small blackberries. I’ve never tried them but they are said to be bitter or tasteless. What I love most about it is its purple-bronze leaves in winter. They were so beautiful there against the green of the moss.

This drooping snowman didn’t seem to be enjoying the spring like temperatures, but he might yet have the last laugh.

When was the last time you spent a quiet moment just doing nothing – just sitting and looking at the sea, or watching the wind blowing the tree limbs, or waves rippling on a pond, a flickering candle or children playing in the park? ~Ralph Marston

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