Fall is my favorite season. Fall is when the weather finally starts to change reminding us that the miserable heat and humidity of summer will actually come to an end. I also love the color provided by the changing of the leaves. Sadly, we live far enough south that we don’t get much color; we have a lot of evergreens and the leaves on the non-evergreens tend to just turn brown and fall off. Northern Georgia gets beautiful color, but joining the crowds of “leaf peepers” means making reservations at least a year in advance. Mostly, I just live vicariously through the photos of my fellow bloggers from the more northern climes.
However, as I look around our yard, I see that we are slowly changing things in our neck of the woods. Our crape myrtles are young, but they are doing their part to bring some color to our yard as do the forsythia.
I have had a life-long fascination with ginkgo trees due to my love of dinosaurs; fossil records indicate that ginkgos have been around since dinosaurs roamed the earth. (I recently learned that ginkgos were around before dinosaurs.) Four years ago, Kenn gifted me a ginkgo of my own which is just starting to turn the beautiful yellow they are known for.
Last fall, we planted two young Japanese maples of different varieties. When I say small, I mean small. Both trees were twigs barely a foot tall when we planted them and we weren’t sure if they would make it. However, both are doing well and while still small, they are starting to look like actual trees. I think the tree that has the red leaves of the traditional Japanese maple is going to require another year or two to come into its own. The second tree, a Japanese Sunrise, is already showing us some pretty color even though the leaves are brown-edged due to the lack of rain over the past few months.
This year, I gifted Kenn a Flame Thrower Redbud for his birthday. However, since we didn’t want to plant it until after our road trip, I had it delivered last week and Kenn planted it the same day. While it is currently tall and skinny with big leaves, we can’t wait to see how it does over the next year. We’re hoping for spectacular color!
Do you get much fall color in your area?
Linda Lou's Life 
We live in New Town St. Charles, and it gets spectacular color. But we haven’t been there the last three Falls. However, I see pictures online from our neighborhood Facebook group. It is so pretty. We’re traveling south right now, and I see bits of color here and there. It’s enough to enjoy. I like all the trees you planted. Good luck with them!
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Thanks! Enjoy your travels!
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Not much color in SoCal, but my neighborhood has liquid amber trees lining some streets–they turn a beautiful red every November–as long as they get enough water.
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I bet they are gorgeous!
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You already know my answer to your question. 🙂
We have a gingko tree too…which I had completely forgotten about until last week. It kind of gets lost among everything else!
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Yes, I do! Your photos are some of the ones I live vicariously through.
We had a freeze not long after I took the picture of my ginkgo. Now, it is mostly bare and the leaves didn’t even have a chance to finish changing!
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Our colors are not as vibrant as usual, except for the Red Maples which always seem to come thru. I have been to several parks during October, but not looked at the pics yet and hoping the sun coming through the leaves looked better in the shot than in person. A fellow blogger used to live in Sacramento and has posted gorgeous pics of how the Gingkos look, all bright yellow – gorgeous!
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My ginkgo didn’t really have a chance to shine this year. The leaves were just starting to change when we had a freeze. Now most of the leaves have fallen.
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That’s a shame – the weather has been such a disappointment this year. Too early for freezing temps in the South for sure, so I hope it did not damage all the peach trees. Several years ago, the apple and cherry trees had blossoms already, then we had a hard freeze and it killed off most of the blossoms, so the main crops for both apples and cherries. Michigan is one of the biggest producers of apples, behind Washington State and they had to have apples hauled in for cider mills, a big harvest-time event here. Traverse City is the cherry capital in Michigan and had to have cherries brought in for their annual festival in July.
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The peach trees should be fine. It’s the late winter/early spring freezes that cause more problems. We had one about three years ago that really hurt peach production that year.
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Well, that’s good, That’s a shame that happened since Georgia is the biggest peach producer, so that was like our cherry/apple loss. We are 25 degrees colder today than yesterday when we were at 68 degrees. The weather is crazy.
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