Tuesday, November 01, 2016

In Suspension

Weather: Temperatures staying about freezing with last rain 10/9.

What’s blooming: Hybrid roses, chocolate flowers, blanket flower.

What’s turning/turned red: Leaves on Bradford pear, pink evening primroses, lead plants, toothed spurge, Johnson’s Blue geranium.

What’s turning/turned yellow: Leaves on cottonwoods, apricots, globe willows.

What’s nearly bare: Purple leaf sand cherry, catalpa, Rose of Sharon, caryopteris, skunk bush.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, moss roses, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, small birds.

Weekly update: Time is standing still. Sun angles change daily, but with the warm, dry days, nature’s preparations for winter are proceeding in slow motion. Little changes from day to day. It’s death by inertia rather than by cold.

The days are ideal for working outside, but there’s little to do. Most of the people have cleared their fields and cut their hay. And, most with trees seem to be watching the leaves fall, but not doing anything yet to remove them. Only the most fastidious go out before all have fallen that are going to.

I have things I could do, but they’re all heavy labor - finishing the repairs on the irrigation channel, extending a path, pruning shrubs. They’ve all been postponed before, and can wait until my thumb is ready for abuse.

It’s possible to find plants blooming in protected areas, but little is visible from the car. Even the roses are hard to see. Chrysanthemums were all but invisible this year. My florist ones are putting out flowers with only half the petals.

Leaves on the skunkbush dropped without turning color, but a young seedling protected by the catalpa has bright red ones. I don’t know if it’s its youth or the seclusion that allowed the member of the sumac family to show its true coloring.

I suppose the birds are migrating, but I haven’t heard them. This morning when I was running a hose that’s sprung a small leak, a half dozen birds came from somewhere for the pooling water, then disappeared when it sank into the gravel.

2 comments:

Vicki said...

Just how I am feeling about this season. We may do a fast plunge into winter this year. In the meantime, it's awfully dark this morning. We need to change those clocks soon!

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