The colors of the fall

From top left to right: 1 and 2 - Praying mantis munching on monarch, 3, 4 - prairie dock, 5 cup plant flower, 6 - red maple.

If you look closely, you will see a praying mantis devouring a monarch butterfly in the first photograph. In the second one, infrared vision plays with the colors…

Cup plant or Silphium perfoliatum in the FalI, where a strange antenna extends upwards from the top of the upside down flower.

From top left to right: Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia), Winged sumac (Rhus coppalina), Dogwood (Cornus sp.), Prairie dock (Silphium terebinthenaceum), Pawpaw (Asimina triloba), Red maple leaves (Acer rubrum) and Sweetgum tree (Liquidambar styraciflua).

Like dominoes, the colors of the fall are leaving us… or are they?

The colors of fall were present during spring and summer but were masked by the green in chlorophyll making of the growing seasons. Some fun science facts:

Chlorophyll is not a very stable compound; bright sunlight causes it to decompose. To maintain the amount of chlorophyll in their leaves, plants continuously synthesize it. The synthesis of chlorophyll in plants requires sunlight and warm temperatures. Therefore, during summer chlorophyll is continuously broken down and regenerated in the leaves of trees.

and

Another class of pigments found in the leaves of many plants is the carotenoids. These leaf pigments absorb blue-green and blue light. The light reflected from them thus appears yellow. Like the chlorophylls, carotenoids are also large molecules and are also contained in the chloroplasts.

A third class of pigments that occurs in leaves is the anthocyanins… light reflected by leaves containing anthocyanins appears red.

Alchemy of the fall, a Cloudless sulphur (Phoebis sennae) lost in similarities to a Northern bayberry (Myrica pennsylvannica)

My favorite book on colors is still Fall color and woodland harvests, by C. Ritchie Bell and Ann Lindsey.

“In colder climates very low winter temperatures dry the air and turn all surface water needed by plants to ice; in effect, the plants are in a dry season that puts the same water stress on them as would a desert.”p 6, Fall color and woodland harvests.

For more inspiration some words from Michael H. Wilson In What is Colour? The Collected Works, (edited by Laura Liska and Troy Vine, Logos Verlag, Berlin, 2018), as quoted by Graig Holdrege in A Commitment to the Phenomena of Color.

The mountains have emerged from the night fresh and clean in their mantle of deep violet blue, and a liquid light pours across the land calling forth colour as it goes. As the sun climbs and warms the earth, the mountain slopes disclose their form in a play of pink light and purple shadow, while beyond them the distant ranges lie serene and still, cool blue beneath the pale transparent turquoise of the rain-washed sky — a colour changing with infinite smoothness to deep cobalt overhead. In front of us the wind-swept autumn grass and the dying bracken glow gold and orange-brown in the morning light and even the outcrops of cold grey rock have joined in the scheme of things and show their sunlit faces warm against shadows of so violet grey. Beyond this the blue of the lake lies back in vivid contrast — a blue embracing all the subtle transitions from clear emerald to deep violet.”

and here the magic of turpentine on a prairie dock leaf (Silphium terebinthinaceum), the elixir of painters.

and poof, dissolved into nothing… or gone underground…

and finally, the magnificent soft colors of Piet Oudolf’s meadows in Autumn at the Delaware Botanic Gardens at Pepper Creek.

For more, check out #Leave the leaves! In my place, there is no rake…mechanical or otherwise… leaves that fall are there to stay and to decay…