Trees
These perfect shade trees always make me smile, all the best farms have them.
Posts tagged ‘Trees’
Last Look at Autumn
Every year I take a stab at photographing autumn foliage with limited success. This fall was particularly interesting, not for the photographs, but for the succession of color change. Normally we have a hard freeze or two that gets the maples really going are the reds and oranges rip through the woods. The cold snap also drops the leaves on a lot of our trees, typically trees like Catalpas go a sickly yellow and fall right off, the Beeches go paper brown, the Birch and Ginkgoes go yellow and drop quickly. This year we got a couple of cold nights, but no hard freeze just a long steady period of cool leading to a very yellow autumn.
This is the view from my office window which most falls is bland at best, this year I had these lovely yellows for well over a month.
For quite a while the only strong red was the Sumacs.
The Maples starting to consider turning.
A stand of Beech showing a nice yellow instead of the bland brown we usually get. Two days after I took this we had a hard frost and they lost all their color. But we had had at least a month of these subtle yellows that I really enjoyed though I think a lot of people were disappointed until the Maples exploded.
Seasons……
When I think of the four season motif my mind usually travels to wall scrolls, brush and ink and mass produced ‘Asian’ culture, though I have seen beautiful examples in museums, books and little shops in Vietnam. Here in the states the motif is certainly common enough, showing the seasons in heroic landscapes or scenes of country living, but I’ve always felt that four seasons really make no sense. In Maine for example they joke that there is a fifth season called Mud and I have lived on enough farms to agree. So here I offer an extended version of the seasons…..winter, first growth, full spring, first cutting/high summer, second cutting/late summer/first fall, high fall, there should be one more for end of fall/beginning of winter, but I couldn’t find one that suited. These were taken at the same location as the allee photos I posted yesterday. The trees are Pin Oaks, a good solid working man’s tree.
Seasons……An Allee on rt 32
There is something about an allee – a tree lined path/road – that always makes me want to photograph it. I am in part pursuing a classic photograph I can only partially recall – black and white, grand old trees, trunks painted white, a narrow curving road, it must have been Europe and taken before 1970. But it is entirely possible that the photo doesn’t exist and I have combined several images in my mind to create the iconic photograph of an allee. These below are an example of my ruminating on allees and a bit of a poke at the classic four seasons images.
Spring trees
The flowering trees have been fantastic this year, both abundant and long lasting. The weather seems to have combined the right amount of moisture and temperatures to keep the flowers on the trees, no sharp hard frosts, no sudden heat waves. In fact we had a rather glorious stretch of spring weather, though now we seem stuck in the proverbial spring rains.
Some trees just take your breath away, you catch this one out of the corner of your eye as you drive past a turn onto a shady lane. I think it’s a Magnolia kobus, because its too big to be a Magnolia stellata, it’s at least 35′ tall (the tarmac in front of it is a driveway not a foot path) and the star magnolias really don’t want to be that big. I wish the photo did it more justice, but like many of the trees I tried to photograph this spring it was hard to get enough distance.
I have trouble with the varieties of cherries, so I won’t hazard a guess, but you would think a tree this pretty would deserve a more attractive location.
This is what people hope to get when they buy a weeping cherry, they won’t. I have no idea how old this tree is but I don’t think those trees people buy for 69 dollars at Lowe’s will ever get this big. I thought it was a weeping willow until I drove buy it it bloom, I bet it’s 40 or 50 years old.
Cornus Florida our native dogwood, I like them best as understory trees in the forest all scraggly and elegant with brilliant white flowers before everything else leafs out. It doesn’t hurt that they turn beautiful colors in the fall either.
Ornamental trees are going to be an on going project, they are very difficult. It is way to easy to make postcards instead of portraits.
cheech 297 