It’s prime time for Fall colors in the garden this weekend. Fire engine reds, smoky apricot oranges, and flashy yellow golds abound throughout the garden. The gloomy gray skies brightened enough for me to take photos of the spectacle. Come, take a look!
After waiting many weeks for peak Fall colors in the garden, I’ve had to resign myself to accepting dull reds, oranges, and yellows as the show for this year.
Murphy’s Law: The best of the show was last weekend when we were on a trip to Seattle.
Hubby snapped these photos during daylight hours last week.
Left to right: A. P. “Red Dragon”, A.P. ” Red Select”, A.P. “Osakazuki”
Left to right: Diablo Ninebark, A. P. “Bloodgood”
Just yesterday, I snapped a few more photos as the fog rose through the trees. The human eye missed most of the fog; the camera lens enhanced it so well.
A. P. “Trompenborg”
A. P. “Oregon Sunset”
Every year, one of the Japanese Maples charms me more than the others. It’s almost as if different varieties take turns on center stage. Acer palmatum “Seiryu” is this year’s charmer. I’ve fallen deeply for the warm apricot tones.
A. P. “Seiryu”
Cycling to work these days is like riding into a rainbow, where the oranges, reds, and yellows of the trees en route take center stage, and the clear blue sky provides needed cool contrast.
The Fall color parade is all around us but not yet in my garden.
I look out onto the pine needle and leaf-enrobed space that is the garden and see mostly green. Actually, this is quite normal for our micro climate here in the trees. We get to enjoy the neighborhood spectacle first and then 2-3 weeks later, the first of our trees turns.
The large vine maple out front, native to the property and filling a void between a few Ponderosa Pines, is first, usually. This year though, the Clethra Acuminata, transplanted during the tree-trunk bed redo in September, is kicking off the show.
Clethra accuminata (Cinnamom Clethra)
It looks like the vine maple will be a close second; the upper leaves are beginning to turn, while the lower ones are still adamantly green.
After the vine maple, it’s anybody’s guess which of the maples are next. Some years it’s been the Thunder and Lightning Japanese maple, while other years it’s been one of the laceleaf maples surrounding the lawn/moss patch out front. One thing for sure, the variegated Orido Nishiki is always last. Strangely enough, it’s also the first maple to leaf out in the Spring.
So the wait continues. Next week, I’m hoping things will change and the parade will begin in earnest. In the meantime, here is one of my all-time favorite Fall color photos, taken last year; the best year for color so far.
As a group, the Japanese Maples are my most precious and favorite residents in the garden. Seeing a well-shaped Japanese Maple brings me back to my days in Japan where everybody, it seemed, had a beautiful maple, even if a bonsai one. Of course, the most amazing and awe-inspiring maples I encountered were in the world-renowned public gardens of Kyoto and “my neighborhood” garden, Sankei-en in Yokohama.
I had no idea there were so many cultivars until I started doing some research for my first maple:
Acer palmatum “Osakazuki”
There are literally thousands, with many more being introduced each year. As luck would have it, Japanese Maples grow very well in the omnipresent shade of my garden. All the cultivars I’ve planted have thrived with minimal care; my biggest task is to keep them artfully shaped.
Acer palmatum “Bloodgood”
At most, I’m an advanced beginner when it comes to pruning and shaping. A few years back, I took a hands-on, highly informative class in January (brrrr) at the Portland Japanese Gardens. That’s where I picked up some basic information and skills:
)I like to lightly prune and shape once or twice a year, in the late Winter and early Summer, when the trees have leafed out. Since I’m still not overly confident about my abilities, the pruning/shaping may be done over a few sessions, when I’ve had time to observe the impact of my work from many different angles, including inside the house.
When I’m feeling relaxed and at peace with the world, I grab my Felco pruners, a collapsible canvas bin, and a bucket of weak bleach solution and head off into the garden to prune/shape. (The weak bleach solution is to clean the pruner blades and prevent the spread of disease between cultivars, if pruning more than one tree at a time.)
It’s a very peaceful process. Snip, stand back, snip again, until I get the effect I’m after. Then it’s on to the next one.
