A New Season

Finally! At last! Fall has come to my little corner of the world! Those summer days and summer nights are gone! Now the days are warm and the nights are cool. The natural world is changing color. Daylight is shrinking and the nights are lengthening. The corn has been harvested. The apples are coming into season. Pumpkins are popping up everywhere I look.

Forget about those college football rankings. Back in the year 1723 Antonio Vivaldi placed Fall in the number 3 spot: after Spring and Summer and before Winter. It's a logical placement, for sure, but Fall doesn't have to be the beginning of the end, the third quarter. It can be whatever we want. The seasons are cyclical and seamless, and we can interpret them however we want. Fall has been coming for weeks. And I've been anticipating it for so long, that it seems to be coming late this year. The seasons are interesting like that. Sometimes we wait and pine for them. And sometimes they sneak up on us like a bolt of black ice lightning.

I find myself enjoying the seasons more as I grow older. Actually, I don't think it's a matter of enjoying them more or less, but rather a matter of enjoying them differently. We see things differently as we age, which is both good and bad. For example: I've always enjoyed looking at the leaves in the Fall. Well now there are names to go with the leaves.

Our 2007 megatransect changed the way I look at the trees. Now, when I see a tree, I immediately wonder what kind it is. Some species are just so obvious: red maple, white pine, sweetgum, tulip poplar--they wear their leaves like name tags. Sometimes the genus and species will pop into my head. Liriodendron tulipifera. Acer rubrum. Pinus strobus. Sometimes I can't remember the name of the tree. And sometimes I come face to face with a tree that I have never seen before. When I returned home after the megatransect, I noticed an interesting looking tree in the forest behind my home. "What's this?" I wondered. "It looks almost like a weird kind of aspen. Crazy! I wonder what it is." Ten minutes later, my good friend Audubon told me that it was the bigtooth aspen, Populus grandidentata. Wow! I was surprised. I never knew there was a type of aspen growing on the East Coast.

Below is what Audubon says about the bigtooth aspen. (From page 324 of National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Trees, Eastern Region by Elbert L. Little.)

"Easily distinguishable from the Quaking Aspen by the large curved teeth of leaf edges, mentioned in both common and scientific names. Like that species, Bigtooth Aspen is a pioneer tree after fires and logging and on abandoned fields, short lived and replaced by conifers. The foliage, twig buds, and bark are consumed by wildlife."

Ah yes, good old Audubon. I carried that book across the country, along with the Peterson guide. They were my go to books for tree identification. (Actually, to be accurate: I only carried the Eastern editions from central Colorado to eastern Virginia. West of central Colorado, I carried the Western Editions.)

Anyway, I've been working on the megatransect data that I collected last summer. I've been entering the data into an Excel spreadsheet for many months now, and I'm almost done with the data entry. The adventure continues, day by day, tree by tree, cell by cell. And, as always, there are new things to discover. Why just last night, while I was looking through my Eastern trees Audubon, I came across this appropriate paragraph:

"Many broadleaf trees are noted for their brilliant fall foliage. These displays are most dramatic in the Northeast but vary with the species and the year, depending on the weather. The leaves in this section are grouped according to the major fall colors: red, orange, and yellow. Red is produced by warm, sunny fall days followed by cool nights that transform leftover food in the leaves into red pigment. Foliage turns orange or yellow when the chlorophyll, which masks other colors, is destroyed; deep orange is a blend of hues. On a single tree, such as a Sugar Maple, leaves of several colors may appear at the same time. The foliage of other trees, such as the Sweetgum, may show different hues at different times, depending upon soil and climatic conditions."

Thank you Audubon, and thank you Mother Nature.

A very happy Fall to one and all!