The time of burgundy and gold

Trees in St. Mary's Cemetery
Saturday, November 5th 2005

We have sailed through "Peak Color" for our trees and are now "Past Peak." (Peak, by my estimation, was Wednesday and Thursday of this past week.) That doesn't mean that the leaves aren't worth seeing, and some people might argue that now is "Peak Color." At this point the bright yellow, orange, and red leaves have all received a shot of brown and are turning into darker, richer hues of burgundy and gold. (A friend's son also quite rightly identified shades of "bronze" and "copper" in the leaves, and noted that "black" is also a Fall color - many of the branches and trunks of trees, visible for the first time since the Spring, are black!)

To see how quickly things have changed in the last two weeks, compare this photo to another one taken in the same cemetery on the morning of Sunday, October 23rd.

And assuming that the color subtleties haven't been lost in JPEG compression, you can even see the pink glow of the atmospheric refraction phenomenon known as the "Band of Venus" rising in the distant Eastern sky in this photo.