Fall makes beauty known in our neck of the woods
SWANTON – Fall is making its mark, encouraged by shorter days and a few doses of colder weather.
The yellows, golds and reds of the hardwoods are coming on, but the best color is still along the edges where sumac, sassafras, wild grapes, Virginia creeper, poison ivy, and a variety of ferns continue to glow.
This recent image features the brilliant reds of a stand of sumac invading a tall grass prairie in Oak Openings Preserve. Nearby, an entire upland forest floor is dotted with thousands of colorful young sassafras. The sassafras understory segues into a different understory in a wet forest dominated by the golds, yellows and bronzes of ferns.
The idea of peak fall color implies that there’s a single best time to get outdoors. But peak color in the prairie is different from peak color in the oak-dominated forest, which is different from a maple and tuliptree forest, which is not the same timing as peak color in bottomland forest, and so on.
Fall color has been with us for several weeks and will continue to evolve and cycle, each species in its own time, into November.
Savor it. Many parts of the world aren’t blessed with fall color like ours.
