Autumn Color

Often people look up at the leaves on the deciduous trees in the fall. Looking down can be just as spectacular, in my opinion. 

I have what I believe to be a Black Sugar Maple, Acer saccharum subsp. nigrum, in my yard that was a sapling when I moved into my current home. The fence guys wanted to remove a whole line of sapling trees when they put in the fence after I moved into the house. I spotted the Maple and told them to leave it. The soil is rich there, it has done very well and is now a gorgeous mature tree which covers the ground with a magnificent display of leaves this time every year.

I never remove leaves from the ground in the fall.They make excellent winter protection and easily decompose turning into rich soil by the middle of the spring. I've never understood why some people rake the leaves, put them into plastic bags, put the bags out to be collected and later buy bags of peat moss or some other kind of mulch to enrich their soil.

I have a volunteer European spindle tree, Euonymus, (below) growing symbiotically in some white cedars which I transplanted as seedlings about forty years ago. I won a grant to do a graduate field studies program up north in connection with Michigan State University and found about five seedlings in a wooded area that was about to become a wood-chipped path. The color of the seed wings of the Euonymous is almost shocking pink at this time of year.

                                                       Clicking on photos enlarges them.